cete of badgers

[prettygoodword]

Theme week! Collective nouns for animals. Which could fill whole semesters, but I'm picking words not otherwise used for other things.


cete - n., a company of badgers.


Or so the American Heritage Dictionary puts it. Possibly from Medieval Latin cetus, assembly, from Latin coetus, a coming together, variant of coitus. Nature is such the perv sometimes.

---L.

Comments

collective

[flw.livejournal.com]

I love collective nouns. "Murder" of crows. "Rafter" of turkeys. I always wonder about the origins. Some of them seem made up.

Re: collective

[fordmadoxfraud.livejournal.com]

You mean like all words?

Re: collective

[prettygoodword.livejournal.com]

I think he means consciously made up in their present form, as opposed to borrowed or inherited.

---L.

[movingfinger.livejournal.com]

I suspect this is the same as the more usual "set" or "sett"?

[prettygoodword.livejournal.com]

Except that a sett is the burrow of a badger, not a group of them.

The OED classifies that sett with set n¹, the action of setting and its derivatives (as opposed to set n², senses of being a collection). And that sense of sett doesn't appear till the late 19th century, well after cete. (Other meanings of sett: a squared paving stone, esp. of granite; each of the squares in the pattern a tartan; the adjustment of the reeds of a loom necessary for the making of a fabric of a particular texture, and the make of fabric the gives; and a tool or device used for setting, eps. a heavy punch or chisel for use on metal or stone -- whee!).

---L.