A murder of crows

[Rob Seaman]

On Nov 21, 2007, at 8:09 AM, Brian Thomas wrote:

> The one on my shelf, "The Random House Thesaurus", published 1984,  
> has only singular terms for nouns (concepts). I did a quick 8 or 9  
> page random survey, then I started looking for astronomical  
> terms...all of the following appear singular:
>
> star, planet, satellite, celestial body, galaxy, comet.
>
> I also took a look at Roget's thesaurus online (http:// 
> thesaurus.com). Type in 'star'
> and you get synonyms that you might expect. Type in 'stars' and you  
> get different information like "the stars and stripes". Try it again  
> with 'galaxy' and you are in good shape. Try it with 'galaxies' and  
> you get no match.
>
> So..I don't see an argument that things are generally in plural in  
> thesauri, in fact, in English, it appears to be the opposite.

Clasp your loved ones close and look to the sky, I'm about to agree  
with Brian - surely one of the signs of the apocalypse...

That said, I'm still having trouble wrapping my head around another  
plural, that of "thesauri".  I can see why completely different fields  
might compile separate thesauruseses - it is more a question of what  
to omit, than what to include.  But really, don't these correspond to  
subsets of the same Platonically ideal thesaurus?  And I don't see why  
a single coherent (ha!) field like astronomy would need more than one  
thesaurus.  Unlike a dictionary, even competing thesaur-thingies like  
Roget's and Random House are, in a sense, different views into the  
same cosmic tome.  They feature different shadings of meaning, but  
those shadings are inherent in the language and its ensemble of  
speakers, not in the document.

Cutting to the chase - what are the requirements that result in this  
working group pursuing multiple instances of the same type of document/ 
service?  Vocabularies - several.  Thesaurus - one.

To return to S vs P:  if we need a tie-breaker, we might look to the  
collective nouns.  This would also bring its own subtle shadings since  
we would henceforth be able to distinguish between geese in flight  
(skein) and geese bobbing around like sitting ducks (gaggle).

So, we would have a "twinkle" of stars, of course, and a "federation"  
of archives, but also a "confusion" of planets, a "used parking  
lot" (or Used_Parking_Lot) of novae, and a "Pon Farr" of exobiologists.

- Rob