The ‘only known joke about collective nouns’
I was listening to radio last night, and laughed my head clean off when I heard this joke – billed as ‘the only known joke about collective nouns’.
I hunted it down and pinched it off the Time website for your pleasure:
Four dons were walking down an Oxford street one evening. All were philologists and members of the English department. They were discussing group nouns: a covey of quail, a pride of lions, an exaltation of larks.
As they talked, they passed four ladies of the evening. The dons did not exactly ignore the hussies—in a literary way, that is. One of them asked: “How would you describe a group like that?”
Suggested the first: “A jam of tarts?” The second: “A flourish of strumpets?” The third: “An essay of Trollope’s?” Then the dean of the dons, the eldest and most scholarly of them all, closed the discussion: “I wish that you gentlemen would consider ‘An anthology of pros.’ “
Hugely amusing. Good spot!
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When I heard it years ago it included “a pride of loins” as one of the descriptors.
Heard this joke in 1962, at college, from our most entertaining professor of English.
In the version I heard, the punchline is “an anthology of old English pros.”