This image — hilarious to those with formidable lexicons — has been making its way around the Internet lately:

Of course, this is only funny if you 1) recognize what crows look like, and 2) know that a murder is a group of crows.

Really? Yep! Just as you would say “a pack of dogs,” many other animals also have unique collective names:

Covey of partridges
Ostentation of peacocks
Charm of hummingbirds
Float of crocodiles

Here is a list of many more.

Most of these are rather silly, but a few contain good GRE words:

Horde of hamsters
Drove of hares
Aerie of hawks
Passel of possum
Coterie of prairie dogs
Bevy of quail
Rout of wolves

A horde is “a large group, multitude, number, etc.; a mass or crowd,” or “a tribe or troop of Asian nomads” or “any nomadic group.” Genghis Khan’s grandson Batu famouly led the Golden Horde.

A drove can be a number of oxen, sheep, or swine driven, but in the plural, droves, refers to a large crowd of people, especially in motion.

An aerie the nest of a bird of prey, as an eagle or a hawk, or “a house, fortress, or the like, located high on a hill or mountain.” Here is a previous post about the word aerie, which is also the name of a lingerie store.

A passel is “a group or lot of indeterminate number.” In other words, “a bunch,” as in, “I’ve got a bunch of towels here,” or “There’s a passel of condiments on the table.”

A coterie is “a group of people who associate closely” or “an exclusive group; clique.” Prairie dogs are probably called a coterie because they live in communal burrows.

A bevy is a large group or collection. From 500 Advanced Words, 1st Edition: Manhattan GRE Vocabulary Flash Cards:

Usage: The bar owner cringed when a bevy of women in ridiculous tiaras came in “ Another drunken bachelorette party, he sighed.

More Info: Bevy is most commonly associated with birds, and often used to describe groups of people who stick together like a flock of birds “ it usually implies a not-very-serious opinion about the group in question.

A rout is “a defeat attended with disorderly flight” or any overwhelming defeat. You can also use it as a verb, as in “to rout an army.” Why is it a rout of wolves? Well, a rout of wolves could certainly rout you.

And that brings us back to the murder of crows. Attempted murder! Nerd joke!

In followup to the previous post about Hurricane Irene, this article from last week contained some unusual vocabulary words:

After the Outer Banks, the storm strafed Virginia with rain and strong wind. It covered the Hampton Roads region, which is thick with inlets and rivers and floods easily, and chugged north toward Chesapeake Bay. Shaped like a massive inverted comma, the storm had a thick northern flank that covered all of Delaware, almost all of Maryland and the eastern half of Virginia.

To strafe (obviously being used metaphorically here) is to “attack (ground troops, for example) with a machine gun or cannon from a low-flying aircraft.”

As a noun, a flank is a lateral part or side — as in, flank steak, or the flank of a mountain.

To flank — another military metaphor — means:

1. To protect or guard the flank of.
2. To menace or attack the flank of.
3. To be placed or situated at the flank or side of: Two stone lions flanked the entrance.
4. To put (something) on each side of: flanked the driveway with tall shrubs.

In other words, to flank is to do something along the side or sides of.

Long Beach, New York, where the surf is starting to pick up and they’re building berms to absorb the sea surge when it comes ashore overnight and Sunday.

A berm is “a narrow ledge or shelf, as along the top or bottom of a slope” or “a nearly horizontal or landward-sloping portion of a beach, formed by the deposition of sediment by storm waves.” To build a berm in preparation for a storm would mean to build up the beach so that it no longer slopes down towards the water.

In New York, authorities began the herculean job of bringing the city to a halt.

Image is “Hercules and the Centaur” by Giovanni da Bologna.

Herculean, of course, means “of unusual size, power, or difficulty” — as in, a job you wish you had Hercules to do for you.

In this post from Damn You, Auto Correct!, someone needs his military rulership to be proofread:

People often confuse regime, regimen, and regiment. All three share the root regere, which also gives us regal, and certainly all three are related to structure, order, and control.

Regime means “a form of government; a government in power or administration; or a prevailing social system or pattern.”

Regimen means “governmental rule or control” (wait, isn’t that what regime means?), “the systematic procedure of a natural phenomenon or process,” or “A regulated system, as of diet, therapy, or exercise, intended to promote health or achieve another beneficial effect; a course of intense physical training.”

Regiment means “a military unit of ground troops consisting of at least two battalions, usually commanded by a colonel; a large group of people,” or as a verb, “to form into a regiment, to put into systematic order.”

Confusingly, regime can also mean “a regulated system, as of diet and exercise; a regimen.”

So, in sum:

I am starting a new skincare regimen (or regime, although people might look at you funny).

The people are oppressed under the shah’s regime.

Oh no, the British regiment is marching into Boston!

The new faculty advisor has decided to regiment our planning by holding us to regular biweekly meetings.

None of these words, of course, mean resumé.

While Ernest Hemingway was not a fan of bombastic language, this quote from For Whom the Bell Tolls gives an excellent description of what it means for something — in this case, anger — to be attenuated.

“His rage began to thin as he exaggerated more and more and spread his scorn and contempt so widely and unjustly that he could no longer believe in it himself.”

The word attenuate often confuses people a bit — it means to make slender, weaken, or rarefy. It often means a combination of those things:

Some critics of the reality show 19 Kids and Counting suggest that parents of so many children must necessarily attenuate their attention, depriving each child of needed care. Others point out that the children seem happy, perhaps more so than many in more conventional families.

So, to attenuate affection is to weaken it by spreading it too thin. You could attenuate a piece of bubble gum by pulling on it until it became thin and weak.

If you attenuate your GRE studies over too long a period of time, you’ll probably lose focus and start forgetting things. Full speed ahead!

Modcloth is an online women’s clothing store, and their product names often include puns — for instance, “By Land or By Seersucker,” or “Un-twill We Meet Again.”

Sometimes, it’s kind of hard to get the joke without a formidable lexicon:

I Ingenue It!

An ingenue is a “naive, innocent girl or young woman,” or the role of such a woman in a play or movie, or an actress who plays such roles. So while it might sound bad to be “naive,” the word “ingenue” is often used positively to refer to the new “it girl” in the movies.

Ingenue is related to two other words that are much more likely to appear on the GRE — ingenuous and its antonym, disingenuous.

Ingenuous means “lacking in cunning, guile, or worldliness; artless,” or “openly straightforward or frank; candid.” (You can just memorize that inGENUous means GENUine — that’s a pretty good trick, right?) That is, ingenuousness is good when you want someone to be honest with you, but it’s a terrible quality for your lawyer to have — you need him or her to be crafty and cunning.

Disingenuous means “not straightforward or candid; insincere or calculating” — in other words, not genuine.

Set a President Dress

This play on words references the expression “set a precedent.”

Precedent shares a root with precede, “to come before.”

A precedent is “an act or instance that may be used as an example in dealing with subsequent similar instances.” For instance:

Eleanor Roosevelt set a precedent for First Ladies’ publicly leading substantial projects rather than merely hosting dinner parties and quietly supporting uncontroversial charities.

Lily-putian Loveliness Dress

Ha! This, of course, is a play on lilliputian, meaning “very small.”

Read more about lilliputian in this post: Vocab at the Movies: Gulliver’s Travels.

You can follow the Dalai Lama on Twitter here, although we doubt he writes the posts himself. Let’s see some of his pithy remarks.

Altruism is “unselfish concern for the welfare of others; selflessness.”

Mundane means “of the world, secular” or “ordinary, concerned with commonplaces.” A synonym is quotidian.

Equanimity means “the quality of being calm and even-tempered; composure.” It comes from the Latin “aequus” for “even” and “animus” for “mind.”

Did you know that animus (the same root in animation) is actually a word in its own right? Animus means “an attitude that informs one’s actions,” or “a feeling of animosity; ill will,” as in, “He couldn’t get over his animus enough to work for his old childhood nemesis.”

Forbearance means “Tolerance and restraint in the face of provocation; patience.” And if you’ve gotten in trouble with your student loans, you know it also means “The act of a creditor who refrains from enforcing a debt when it falls due.”

Impartial means “fair, unbiased, not prejudiced.”

This Tweet didn’t use any GRE-style vocabulary words, but it did remind me of one: syncretism, the “reconciliation or fusion of differing systems of belief, as in philosophy or religion, especially when success is partial or the result is heterogeneous.”

Feeling enlightened yet?

A scion is a descendant or heir, generally of a rich person. And while there’s nothing in the dictionary definition about being male, culturally speaking, the word scion is almost always used to describe the son of a powerful man.

I have used scion in class as an example of denotation vs. connotation (the dictionary definition of a word versus the “feeling” or cultural baggage of the word), and was thinking: I’ve never heard anyone describe a woman as a scion, but there’s no reason you couldn’t. For instance, Ivanka Trump, daughter of Donald Trump.

While Paris Hilton is an “heiress” (no one thinks she’s going to end up running the Hilton hotel brand someday), Ivanka is a mogul in her own right.

A mogul is “an important or powerful person” or “a rich or powerful person.” The word derives from Moghul or Mughal, a member of the Muslim dynasty founded by Baber (or a soldier supporting that dynasty) that ruled India until 1857.

Another word that comes to us from Hindi is nabob, “a person of wealth and prominence.” This originally was a European who made his fortune in India or elsewhere in the East. (Indian restaurants called Nawab or other variant spellings are referencing this colonial legacy.)

A variety of celebrity-type articles have referred to Ivanka’s newborn baby as a “mini-mogul.” Interestingly, when I Googled to find an example, all the articles that used the phrase “mini-mogul” were from before Ivanka actually gave birth. No one has yet used the phrase to refer to the baby after it was born. Maybe because it’s a girl? Interesting.

Final post from Damn You, Auto Correct!:

The person who sent this in remarks that she meant “Hilarious.”

From the comments:

Hoosegow isn’t a new word. It’s a slang term for jail.

The really hoosegow thing here is that the AutoCorrect is apparently being trained by 19th-century cowboys.

You’d be surprised. Everytime I try to type in my friend Greg’s name it wants to auto-complete to Gregarious.

My last name is Hasegawawhich autocorrects to Hoosegow.

Hoosegow does indeed mean “jail,” and it comes from the Mexican Spanish jusgado for “prison,” which ultimately comes from the Latin judicāre, from judex, “a judge.”

I may be advertising the fact that I am a decade older than my students, but I already knew hoosegow from the Red Hot Chili Peppers “Give It Away” (on Youtube here):

I’m a low brow but I rock a little know how
No time for the piggies or the hoosegow
Get smart get down with the pow wow
Never been a better time than right now.

Supposedly, the working title of the Chili Peppers’ new album is “Dr Johnny Skinz’s Disproportionately Rambunctious Polar Express Machine-head.” Take that, GRE!

This post from Damn You, Auto Correct! inappropriately inserts the word buttressed:

As a noun, a buttress is a structure, usually brick or stone, built against a wall for support or reinforcement; something resembling a buttress, such as the flared base of certain tree trunks, a horny growth on the heel of a horse’s hoof, or a projection from a mountainside; or just anything that serves to support, prop, or reinforce.

As a verb, to buttress means “to support or reinforce with a buttress; to sustain, prop, or bolster.”

The related word bolster means, literally, a long narrow pillow or cushion, but you can also use the word as a verb to mean “to support or prop up with or as if with a long narrow pillow or cushion; to buoy up or hearten.”

So, let’s get this straight — a buttress is a support for a building and a bolster is more of a support for your back when you sit down. But you can use both words to mean “to support.” An army can buttress its defenses, and someone can bolster your spirits with a care package.

Here is a previous post on the Vocabulary Blog about buttress.

In this post on Damn You, Auto Correct!, someone is unintentionally referring to tiles used in mosaics:

According to Wikipedia, a tessera (plural: tesserae) is “an individual tile in a mosaic, usually formed in the shape of a cube.”

Tesserae is also the term for dice used in ancient Rome (makes sense — they’re cubes!) or for the layers of calcification on sharks’ otherwise cartilaginous jaws and backbones (um, interesting).

And now, this post:

A garderobe is a chamber for storing clothes, a wardrobe; or the clothes stored in such a chamber; or simply any private chamber.

The word is Middle English from Old French and really does come from the roots for “guarding” your “robes.” (So does the word “wardrobe,” actually.)