I have recently been working on a short story about a time when I was a teenager, working as a clown for the special olympics and got beat up by a retarded kid, then ridiculed by his friends as I rolled around on the ground with the wind knocked out of me. During the time I've been writing the story I discovered that the name for a group of clowns is a "Mutiny", a Mutiny of Clowns. I'm not sure how that fits into the story, especially since from my perspective there was mutiny against the clown, but I know that it does somehow. Regardless, that information was amazing to me for several reasons. One of which is that I trip out on the titles for groups of animals.
Examples- A group of:
Owls is a Paliment
Alligators is a Congregation
Bears is a Slueth
Weasels is a Business.
Robots is a Cog (I don't know how that's possible, but it was on the internet so clearly it's fact)
As a quasi-related foot note, I read that the name for the Ku Klux Klan comes from the Greek word Kuklos, which means circle of, or group of. Obviously the mispelled word klan, also means group. So the title Ku Klux Klan apperantly means "Group of Group". Not surprising that an organization of this nature would have a less than cogent title. But they may consider changing their name to the more appropriate, Mutiny of Clowns.
Not really sure this is discussion worthy, but I'm new here. So I figured I'd post it in case anyone has any even tangentially related thoughts.
A favourite of mine is 'a venue of vultures'.
Where did you hear about a group of clowns being called a mutiny? I know there was a joke on Archer that used the two words in the same sentence...
http://www.npwrc.usgs.gov/about/faqs/animals/names.htm
This is for animals. And a government site. Double win!!!
A deceit of lapwings; A crash of rhinoceroses; a tower of giraffes; a fall of woodcocks....
And apparently, the clowns, it's a Clown Alley for a group of them.
It's based on the working clowns would all get their makeup on in an alley behind the circus tent, and the alley became associated with them, so.... a group of clowns is a clown alley.
Yeah I've seen that episode of Archer. But I heard from a friend about it being called a Mutiny. Since it was relavant to the story I was writing I looked online & found it in a few places.
An Alley is definitely also used for a group of clowns, which I think is pretty cool.Kind of sounds like a group of evil clowns, which is a real thing, as I learned in clown school. They also teach you how to spot a good clown from an evil one, which felt really helpful.
Other terms for a group of clowns are: a "nest", "bunch", "troup" or "trunkload" (which is also pretty awesome). But a Mutiny is definitely on the list.
Here is a link to a site with a list of all kinds of that shit:
http://en.wiktionary.org/wiki/Appendix:English_collective_nouns
It's all alphabatized by group. To find the clown list you have to scroll down to the 2nd alphabet in the C section.
Just logged in to add that sounds absolutely fascinating. Though I'm wondering what's meant by evil clowns. Clowns that play the evil role, or actual evil clowns?
Good luck with it.
And picturing clowns having a mutiny made me cackle, I'm not sure why.
Well I had always thought that the idea of evil clowns was just a product of some people's phobia of clowns, which seems pretty common. But when they were teaching us how to do our make-up, they emphasized that being able to tell the evil from the good clowns was all in the design of the face paint. One of the examples was a picture of famed serial killer John Wayne Gacey. In his spare time he was a clown for children's parties, and was later discovered to have murdered 33 young men and boys. So I'm assuming they were quite serious about there being very real evil clowns doing despicable things. Though I'm sure some just play at it. Once you know how to spot it, Gacey's make-up was the epitome of evil. It's startling to think that even w/o the knowlege anyone would hire a guy that looked like that to entertain children.
And let's not forget a murder of crows!
Also, I could see that story being hilarious.
