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Uan aa Boa wrote:

I did enjoy the crows/ravens joke, so I'm not just being grumpy here, but these collective nouns are a strange thing because they're not real words. Nobody says "I saw an unkindness of ravens today." It only come up in discussions about how bizarre it is that the collective noun for ravens is an unkindness. They occupy a self-referential linguistic island. You even get a word for a group of owls (a parliament) despite the fact that owls are solitary, territorial birds that don't gather in groups. It seems a distillation of the question about whether dictionaries dictate what language means or describe how it's actually used.

That said, a relative once coined the wonderfully expressive collective noun "a collaboration of bastards."

I once read that most of the popular collective nouns were all coined during something of a fad for the idea of them. Previous to that, there were some that more or less arose organically, and when the need arose for special cases. But as more scientists and naturalists cottoned on to their existence, and that there were even some whimsical ones, a kind of Cambrian explosion of them occurred. There was an arms race to come up with the most fanciful and poetic collective nouns. But none of these more artificial examples had a need for their existence which would warrant their continued use, so no one did. Except in cases which you mention, pointing out their oddity.