Spectator literary competition No. 2839
The recent call to coin collective nouns for tweeters, hackers, hoodies, WAGs, environmentalists, bankers, MPs and contrarians pulled in a record-breaking entry and there were lots of unfamiliar names in the postbag. Inevitably, there was also a fair amount of repetition: nest/cacophony/outrage/triviality of tweeters came up more than once, as did skulk/huggle/scowl of hoodies; bonus/wad/wunch/trough of bankers; knot/perversity/Hitch of contrarians; vacuum/bling/surgery of WAGs; flood of environmentalists; expense of MPs; to list just a few.
I especially liked Graham Peters’s and John Doran’s ‘thong of WAGs’, Sarah Drury’s ‘concatenation of tweeters’, Poppy McLean’s ‘excess of MPs’, Una McMorran’s ‘mischief of contrarians’, Mike Morrison’s ‘Guardian of environmentalists’, P.C. Parrish’s ‘womengerie of WAGs’, J.R. Johnson’s ‘tawd of WAGs’, David Farrant’s ‘rapacity of bankers’, Tracy Davidson’s ‘virus of hackers’, John MacRitchie’s ‘bristle of contrarians’, Patrick Smith’s ‘sorryority of WAGs’ and John O’Byrne’s ‘s-warm of environmentalists’.
Alan Mercado kindly wrote to inform me that the Times published a selection of readers’ collective nouns for politicians a decade or so ago.
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