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For decades my parents had a framed poster in their guest bathroom.  I think they got if from someplace like the old Spencer’s shops that acted as most malls’ premier crapatoriums.  It was a typewritten list of various collective nouns for animals, starting with “A Crash of Rhinoceroses” and continuing for some 30 or 40 species (“A Parliament of Owls,” anyone?).  It was the conversation piece of all conversation pieces, even if it did lead to cocktail party guests hopping up and down in the hallway waiting for the previous bathroom user to finish reading the list.

This led me, years ago, to create “An Ostentation of Peacocks,” and to every few months or so add a new one to the collection.

The newest, looking suspiciously like the cover art of a children’s book, is “A Loveliness of Ladybugs.”  What makes these fun, I hope, is the laundry list of other collective nouns for animals that wander across the image.  I can pretty much guarantee that whoever purchases this, frames it, and hangs it in the bathroom will also experience decades of houseguests hopping up and down in the hallways waiting for the previous user to stop reading and get off the pot, as it were.  And if that’s not a sales pitch I don’t know what is.

As you can see, there are dozens of possibilities for future additions to the collection.  And new collective nouns are coming into existence every day.  Unfortunately, I’m baffled as to how I would illustrate the latest one: 

An Alternate of Facts.