Collective Nouns for Computer Science
Brian Foote, Jeff Overbey and I were recently engaged in this conversation about collective nouns in english language. This spawned off when I stumbled upon an API that had two methods called GetConfig(...) and GetParameter(...). They had the same signature and apparently were querying the same thing. So, what is the difference between a configuration and a parameter. Jeff suggested that a configuration may be a collection of parameters. And we went off with the idea of collections.
Collective nouns are a very curious aspect of English language. There are separate collective nouns for collection of a specific animal and they are very colorful. What do you call a collection of buffaloes ? - "An obstruction of Buffaloes". What do you call a collection of Cockroaches ? - "An intrusion of Cockroaches".... And so the list goes. I think this is where the English breaks down and the reason is word overloading. "obstruction" is not an obstruction when used with buffaloes. In computer science, we have seen similar degeneration with the abuse of overloading operators. It was one of the most awful concepts of object orientation as we took the overloading of method names too far.
Anyways, Brian, the most imaginative soul as he is, came up with some collective nouns for computer scientists. What do you call a collection of programmers? - "A prickle of programmers" (compare "A prickle of porcupines"). And a collection of Bureaucrats? surely "An annoyance of Bureaucrats". And again a collection of Graduate Students - "An ingratiation of Graduate Students". Apparently, ducks take it even further, so when they are flying they are "A team of ducks", when they are idle in water they are "a raft of ducks", and when they are swimming in water they are "a paddling of ducks". We thought of similar collection names for formalists. A collection of formalists is "an obfuscation of formalists", when the formalists are in a meeting that is "a fumigation of formalists" and when they are in your qual committee it is quite naturally "an obstruction of formalists".
PS. Here are some links of sites that have a collection of collective nouns for animals.
http://www.geocities.com/eedd88/animals.html?20059http://www.stalking.co.uk/group.htmlhttp://rinkworks.com/words/collective.shtmlhttp://www.enchantedlearning.com/subjects/animals/Animalbabies.shtmlhttp://www.hintsandthings.co.uk/kennel/collectives.htm 
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