nature
What on Earth Is He Talking about?
JARGON. IT CAN BE THE MOST ANNOYING THING IN THE WORLD TO LISTEN TO. YET IS THERE ANY SENSE IN IT, AND DON’T WE ALL USE IT SOMETIMES?
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all came down or instance, you are discussing with a to hunting. friend a recipe you would like to try. You may ask, “Do you marinate the meat? Now Mankind had always hunted for food How long for? Do you seal it?” All these (hence “Hunter-gatherer” as a description are asked in the jargon of the cook. You of Early Man’s lifestyle), but as society understand them, your friend understands developed, kings and other high-ranking them, and a lot of time officials spent more is saved because you time ruling or As soon as someone stops don’t have to describe fighting, and hired doing something, they get all a mutually understood underlings to hunt set of processes. misty-eyed about it and want their food for them, and as is the way to do it again Where did it with these matters, all start? as soon as someone I started thinking stops doing about this when I looked up “Collective something, they get all misty-eyed about it nouns” while I was researching starling and want to do it again. So a form of murmurations. It turns out that this ritualised hunting was instituted, for business of having special words for which large tracts of forest (e.g. the New groups of different creatures started off Forest) were created, where kings and their entourages could hunt in relative not long after the Norman conquest, and
38 etcetera
By Mik
e Geo r ge
Mike George is our regular contributor on wildlife and the countryside in France. He is a geologist and naturalist, living in the Jurassic area of the Charente
comfort, and recapture the heady days of their youth. Only now it was exclusive, and you didn’t want the proles and the plebs joining in, so you invented a system of special words which all those “in the know” could use, and which an outsider couldn’t unless they were initiated and took the trouble to learn them. These included collective nouns for animals (hounds, for example, were counted in “couples”). Different processes in butchery were set up and named (you may remember the Sword in the Stone, by TH White, in which poor King Pellinore gets one of his terms for part of an animal wrong and is spanked ritually with the flat
