Long-time logophiles know that curious words crop up to describe groupings of animals. An unkindness of ravens, a parliament of owls, so forth. And on the same day that a friend of mine was bemoaning the sheer number of metaphors she had to wade through, I came across this delightful Wondermark comic.
So I thinks to myself, what's the word for a whole bunch of metaphors crammed together? A commonwealth? A congress? A translucence? Then I had it. And after spending more than a little time that should have been spent sleeping and precisely NO time researching whether or not this had been done before, I had it. Collective nouns. For English.
You're welcome.
- A mix of metaphors.
- A likeness of similes.
- A pause of commas (suggested by Andrew).
- A stoppage of periods (also suggested by Andrew)
- A tensor of parentheses.
- A squadron of semicolons.
- An ass-load of regular colons
- An impertinence of innuendo.
- A Constitution of articles.
- An obviousness of foreshadowings.
- A head of metonyms.
- A confession of references.
- A forest of symbols.
- Anastrophe of vector a.
- A ray of hyphens.
- An aside of dramatic ironies.
- A misinterpretation of regular ironies.
- A happening of gerunds.
- A perigrination of participles.
- of in medias res.
- A constellation of authors.
- A recurrence of flashbacks.
- A missive of quotations.
- A spl-fucking-it of tmeses.
- A skyscraper of isocolons.
- A frustration of anticlimaxes.
- A good relationship of climaxes.
- A stormcloud of pathetic fallacies.
- An implausibility of allegories.
- An association of analogies.
- A sponnybrook of doonerisms.
- A tautology of tautologies.
- A siege of ontologies.
- An antibiotic of non sequiturs.
- An inzameling of polyglots.
- A reunion of cognates.
- An ENTIRE FUCKING UNIVERSE of hyperbole.
- A stream of consciousness.
- An asylum of grammarians.
- An irrelevance of bloggers.
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