Author Description

The year was 1486 and “The Boke of St. Albans” was published, containing amongst many observations of the day, a list of “Companys of beestys and fowlys” which included items such as a Covey of Partridges, a Flight of Swallows and a Litter of Whelps. Fast forward over 500 years, and we see the emergence of AI Image Generation, whereby text prompts can be entered into specially trained algorithms to create images. Now combine the ancient lists of “beestys” with the AI image generation capabilities of today and you end up with this book. The English language is always evolving and so too is technology, so this book is the happy confluence of 2 ever evolving streams. Just as the reach of The Bible increased dramatically when combined with the 1440’s technology of Gutenberg’s moveable type printing press, so too will the knowledge of collective animal nouns blossom as a result of this book. Discussions on the origins of these collective nouns are hot topics amongst various fora frequented by word detectives, so there was some trepidation in enquiring “what is the collective noun for a group of collective nouns?” Given the very serious nature of these discussions amongst word-loving logophiles, such a question could release a torrent of opinions and potentially not arrive at a commonly agreed conclusion. This book started as a fun experiment to test the bounds of AI image generation technology. I was playing around with the various AI models, in Australian slang, I was ‘farnarkeling around’ with the technology. It was surprising how little time it took to accumulate over 100 such collective animal nouns, so I have converted the verb Farnarkeling into the noun Farnarkle to encompass these images of collective nouns. I hope you have as much fun farnakeling through this book as I did creating it