Driving home, I saw a group of bats above the rice fields, swooping, diving, and generally munching down on all the tasty mosquitoes. But it occurred to me, I have no idea what the collective noun for bats is. The Macquarie Dictionary says it’s a colony; James Lipton, in his incredible compendium, An Exaltation of Larks, cites a natural history book and calls them a cloud. But from what I saw this evening, from the perspective of just another mosquito looking for a place to land, the only phrase that comes to mind is a terror.

File under: wordology