Collectively speaking

Comedian George Carlin died on this day in 2008.  Carlin, who called himself a "cunning linguist," loved words and all the ways we use and misuse and dance around them. A lot of his jokes were about how inadequate words could be.  "What's the plural of hell of a guy?" he asked. "Would it be hells of guys?" 

How about hellows?  Not great, but we'll try to do better with these suggestions for collective nouns, in Carlin's honor:

A slew of gladiators
A herd of sounds
An order of skunks
A brood of beers
A band of books
A drove of cars
A knot of zeroes
A muster of hotdogs
A rash of diapers
A horde of prostitutes

My meal ticket

Thinking of starting a new business, offering specialty placemats for diners and cafeterias. They would feature pithy quotations, riddles, jokes, et al.

The name: Place Mots.

Just banning "Trees" would have saved a million trees

Kay Ryan was named poet laureate of the United States. "I might take it upon myself," she said, "to prevent all bad poetry from being published."

She's a poet,
And boy, does she know it.
Just because she's the Laureate,
She feels entitled to excoriate
The poetasters among us?
As if we were fungus,
To be scraped away.
But how can she say
What's superior in verse
Without preserving what's worse?

Dickens, as dead as a door-nail, still lives

Charles Dickens died on this day in 1870.

He gave his name to idioms in this vein -- A "dickens" of a time, the "dickens" you say, what the "dickens," et al.

Dickens also created many characters whose names have entered the lexicon, or instantly suggest an image of a certain type of person -- Scrooge, Uriah Heep, Micawber, Pickwick, Fagin.

Some characters, only Dickens could have named: Sweedlepipe, Honeythunder, Bumble, Pumblechook, M'Choakumchild, Podsnap, Gradgrind.

The word Dickensian, of course, conjures up a whole slew of images.

One scientist of onomastics (the study of names) has declared that Dickens created 989 distinct characters, which inspires us to coin a word of our own to describe this fastidious scholar:

Onomastochist.

For more about Dickens, visit Farewells, June 9

Noisy Parker

Writer and wit Dorothy Parker died on this day in 1967. She was a member of the Algonquin Round Table, a group of writers, journalists, raconteurs and general idlers and time wasters that regularly met at the Algonquin Hotel in New York City to drink and insult everyone including each other, and to exchange the barbs and one-liners they'd saved up for the occasion.

Parker was probably the most talented of the group. She wrote several short stories that have stood the test of time, notably "Big Blonde," and her poems ("Men seldom make passes/At girls who wear glasses.") are still quoted.

She apparently coined the phrases "what the hell," "one-night stand," and "ball of fire."

"Maybe it is only I," Parker wrote, "but conditions are such these days, that if you use studiously correct grammar, people suspect you of homosexual tendencies."

For more about Dorothy Parker, visit Today in Farewells

A Bentley of an insult

Today is the birthday of George III of England, born in 1738.

George the Third
Ought never to have occurred.
One can only wonder
At so grotesque a blunder.

-- Edmund Clerihew Bentley

Of cribbages and kings

Sir John Suckling, the English Cavalier poet, died on this day in 1842. He invented the game -- and apparently the word -- cribbage.

I met a lady last year who played in a cribbage group every week. Each time she left home to attend, her husband would ask her:

"Going to play that cabbage game again?"