Brian Rogers Rogers Rabbits www.sunlive.co.nz

It's festive holiday times, as some of you may have noticed. Not sure what gave it away, perhaps the sight of Santa stuck upside down in the Trinity Wharf chimney might be a small clue.

Actually the same thing happened to him last year. Not wanting to cast aspersions on Santa at this busy time of the year, with all the stress and everything, but I do wonder if the guy is a bit dim? You'd think he'd learn after the first year or so. To keep ending up in the same dilemma…I bet the nice people at the hotel are getting mighty tired of it.
So yes, getting back on the track here (have another egg nog) it is festive holiday times.

And what better time to celebrate the marvellous English language… the language that gives us so much joy all year round.

One interesting family game to play, while huddled around the snowman or the fire (do not get these two close together), or to play in the car on a road trip, is to invent some new collective nouns.

We can never have too many of them. I was just saying to my wife the other day: 'We can never have too many collective nouns,” and she agreed, while arranging a posy of flowers. See what I did there?

Anyway, for those of you who have been under an avalanche of rock and missed it; a collective noun is the name given to a group of things. Such as a herd of cattle. A coven of witches. An embarrassment of office Christmas party-goers. A frisk of border control officials.

The Guardian, a fine and upstanding English news organisation, came up with 10 of the best Collection Nouns last year. (Thanks to W. Watusi for pointing it out). They included: A damning of jurors, an incredulity of cuckolds, a murder of crows, a misbelief of painters, a parliament of owls, a promise of tapsters, a bloat of hippopotamuses. Or is that hippopotami?