Category Archives: Writer’s Block

Collective Nouns

4 Replies

What do you call a pair of crows? Answer – attempted murder.

This type of joke is from a genre called highbrow humour. Why… because you have to have some specific knowledge before you can understand the joke. In this attempted murder case (pun intended) you have to know that the collective noun for three or more crows is a murder. Ah, now the joke makes sense… and leads us nicely into what this post is actually about i.e. collective nouns.

It never ceases to amaze me just how many collective nouns there are in the English language. For example, we have a murder of crows (you knew that!), a belt of asteroids, a cackle of hyenas, a flight of stairs, a sentence of judges, an impatience of wives and a den of thieves. These ones are fairly normal and, I’d guess, fairly widely known. If you Google ‘collective nouns’ you’ll find a wealth of words describing nearly every group imaginable. Even with the abundance of official collective nouns, there are still a lot of groups which have yet to be allocated their own special word.

Here are a few suggestions which could fill the some of the gaps:

  • A blaze of firemen
  • A smothering of Social Workers
  • A gathering of combine harvesters
  • A shoal of nudists
  • A wunch of bankers
  • A collection of philatelists
  • A camp of bell-ringers
  • A heard of listeners
  • A number of mathematicians
  • A drift of castaways
  • A pouch of Chewbaccas
Any more for any more? For example, what is the above group of collective nouns called?

Best opening lines of a novel… ever

Leave a reply

I have been writing for more years than I care to remember. Mainly business writing – things like sales proposals, material for marketing collateral and web site content. I love writing.

However a few years ago I was given the opportunity to explore the world of fiction writing… and I’ve been learning more and more about the craft ever since. My first novel, Dark Tidings, was published in 2011 and since then I’ve completed and published two more.

Of course, I love my books and I think the opening lines create enough interest to make people want to read on… obviously it would be a poor show if they didn’t! But it made me wonder about the best opening lines ever… they say ‘don’t judge a book by its cover’ but maybe it’s OK to judge it by its first lines.

The editors of American Book Review selected what they consider the most memorable first lines of novels… 100 Best First Lines of Novels. OK, there are a lot of classics there but none which strike me as the ‘best ever’. I would nevertheless have been very proud of – “The sky above the port was the color of television, tuned to a dead channel.” It’s so good that I now feel I must read the book from which that line comes; William Gibson’s Neuromancer.

All in all, I think my favorite to date is from The Stranger by Camus – “My mother died today, or perhaps it was yesterday.” You just have to read on after that.

I also very much liked how Terry Pratchett opened The Light Fantastic… “The sun rose slowly, as if it wasn’t sure it was worth all the effort.”

There are also some very special sentences in books which, had they been the first lines, would have been in contention to be the best in this particular competition e.g. Cathy Cash Spellman’s novel An Excess of Love – “He was as guarded as a virgin, but infinitely more experienced.”

And what about the worst opening lines ever? How about… how about we leave that for another time?

Compound words – a spelling lesson

Leave a reply

When my editor/proofer returned my manuscript of Dark Tidings, I was surprised to see so many corrections to, what I discovered later are referred to as, compound words. Compound words can be used as nouns, verbs, adjectives, or adverbs and can be spelled as one word, two words, or hyphenated. It sometimes depends on how the word is used and where it appears in the sentence. For example, word processing… a PC used for word processing will usually run a word-processing package.

Apparently I had adopted a very ‘relaxed’ style, which means I had spelt words in the way I felt made it easiest for the reader. I actually liked the style, but my publisher wanted formal spelling rules to be followed.

This was quite traumatic because I had to check all the compound words in the book… and that was after I had researched the subject and discovered that there are twenty-one (numbers are always hyphenated) basic rules. Here is an example of one of the rules.

A hyphenated compound is simply a combination of words joined by hyphens. The hyphen unites, and separates, the component words in a way that aids understanding, readability and the correct pronunciation e.g. well-to-do. An open compound is a combination of words so closely associated that they convey a specific idea or concept, but they are spelled as unconnected words e.g. lowest common denominator.

As you can imagine, it took me a while to feel I had a proper handle on the ‘basics’. So now, with handle firmly grasped, I can write my books without the worry of revisiting (not re-visiting) the whole text later. A word of warning though, have a good dictionary to hand at all times because the rules don’t always give you the right answer.

And if you can’t proofread the whole text, at least spot-check it (are the compound words here right or wrong?).

That’s my confession, what about you? What type of words do you always struggle to spell?

If you’d like to know the basic rules, please read the full article – Compound Words – the basics