Donald,
You're right - maybe it's a silly venture - maybe cavers will refuse to
adopt the noun after the contest - but it's a fun thing to do anyway,
and it exhibits a little creativity that we can share among ourselves,
and maybe a few laughs in these days when real caving is limited. So
let's see what we wind up with. The future is unwritten.
Lee
On 4/24/2021 10:47 PM, DONALD G. DAVIS wrote:
On Sat, 24 Apr 2021, Lee H. Skinner wrote:
Thanks, Mimi!
Very cute essay.
But there will be only one winner and no 2nd or 3rd place winners. I
will announce the number of votes each name got, and if there is no
majority, I will hold a runoff vote (there is no reason to rush it
through).
So the term will refer to all cavers, not different types of cavers.
You have a herd of longhorns, not packs of Angus or schools of
Herefords. The purpose of the survey is to get cavers to start using
the winning term enough (when appropriate) so that it get ingrained
in cavers' minds such that it will become automatically used
throughput the world caving community , eventually becoming
mainstream in time so that the noun will get into dictionaries.
I've stayed out of this so far, because I've never been a fan of
weird collective names for particular animals like "murder" of crows,
but here's my two cents' worth. I've always thought that "team" of
cavers is perfectly satisfactory, at least for project caving. I
can't foresee an eccentric group name actually catching on among
active cavers--what would they need it for? Seems as if it would just
complicate communication. I suspect that these oddities got their
start among farmers who kept several kinds of livestock and could
shorten their talk if every species had its unique flock term--or in
class societies where each class had a name like "Untouchables" or
"Brahmins"--but it's hard to see how this fits cavers.
--Donald
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