A group of crows is called a murder.
Why?
I assume the word murder was already taken for “the unlawful premeditated killing of one human being by another”
So the dude (or dudette… word creators can be women too, sexist reader. #HighRoaded) who saw a group of crows either had never heard of killing people before, or knew what they were doing.
If they had never heard of killing people before, let’s be honest, they should not be in charge of naming new things. Especially because I’m pretty sure murdering existed before crows existed. Like one amoeba murdering another?
No, wait, the definition of murder is specific to humans. So crows might have existed before “murder” as a concept. Well, a quick google says crows have been around for 30 million years and humans for just 5–7 million. I won’t provide a source because where has the trust in each other gone? Are we a bunch of humans or a murder?
Presumably, we have been killing each other ever since, but “unlawful” killing seems to have only been around since “law” has been around. And another google search says the first law we had was in 2050 BC. (This source is Wikipedia, so the not-sharing is more out of shame rather than trust)
So murder as a concept cannot be more than 4070 years old.
So did a group of crows drive the etymology towards the act of humans unlawfully killing each other?
Well, yet another interesting filter is we are talking in the language English.
At this point, I googled “murder etymology” and “murder etymology crow” says murder(crows) is around since 1500 AD-ish, and murder(vanilla) since 1300 AD-ish. I could have read another 2 lines and understood the actual origin of both words, but that would render my last 15 minutes of blogging moot. And it’s 10:49 PM. I got shit to do other than deleting and re-writing a blog. Let’s just press on!
So the gender-neutral dudeness saw a group of crows and called them “murder”. But what does it mean?
Maybe they saw the crows eat a dead body, yelled it, and it stuck?
Maybe they just hated crows and were being mean to crows? I hate pigeons, and totally can relate.
Maybe, just maybe, they forgot murder was a word in use, and just said 2 syllables to get home early on a Friday evening.
Am I crazy? Or am I on to something? I guess we will never know.
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