Fun With Words

[pameladlloyd]

My friend, lnhammer, also keeps a journal he calls Larry's Pretty Good Word of the Day, over at prettygoodword. Tuesday's word was actually a pair of words with similar meaning: "mickle" and "muckle."

While "donating" rice over at Free Rice, I came across another word, which I just couldn't help sharing: "clowder." You see, we've got a mickle clowder of cats. Which means, to use more common terminology, that we have a large group of cats.

Edit: Oh, I forgot to mention, that AskOxford.com has an entire section on the terms used for collections of animals.

Comments

[asakiyume.livejournal.com]

Clowder makes me think of chowder, so now I'm imagining a bunch of cats in chowder... which is an odd visual.

How many cats in your mickle clowder of cats?

[pdlloyd.livejournal.com]

Clowder makes me think of chowder, so now I'm imagining a bunch of cats in chowder... which is an odd visual.

Me too. I even worried, after I'd click the Post button, that I'd managed to misspell it, and people would think we were having a very interesting meal.

How many cats in your mickle clowder of cats?

We currently have six cats, down from twelve a couple of years ago, as the elderly cats have passed away. We have a little bit of, er, difficulty, when it comes to saying "no" to animals, so we've also got five dogs, which is also a smaller number than it used to be. We're working very, very hard on not adding any new critters to the menagerie.

[larryhammer]

It's been a few years since I did clowder, hasn't it....

---L.

[pdlloyd.livejournal.com]

Probably. I'm afraid that even knowing about your PGWotD, I didn't attend to it faithfully until I was working in the office with you, and then had a hiatus until I started really paying attention to how much I could do with LJ.