On Friday, March 28, 2003, at 02:14 pm, Dan Kogai wrote:
On the other hand, counting can be tricky even for natives. The very name of numbers changes depending on what you count.
parallels for this in English can be seen in English group names - a gaggle of geese, a troop of monkeys, a knot of toads, a pack of dogs. Anyone care to suggest a good one for a group of perl programmers ? a larry, a wall, a camel ..... ;-)
I don't think we can use 'camel' unless we're willing to admit that we also have not evolved to smell good.
I'd like to go with 'pathologically ecclectic list', but that doesn't fall off the tongue very well.
We could go with something resembling a collective form of 'japh' - perhaps 'japher' - to be delightfully recursive.
I don't think we can use 'wall', as it is too connotative of 'preventing things from being done', and there's always MTOWTDI.
Ergo, I'm going to suggest 'hash'. We're all unique, we're all addressed by name, and we're not guaranteed to be returned in any particular order.
-Jeff
