Oddly enough, that gathering of geese in flight is a wedge. When they aren’t in formation, but still in flight, they are skein or a team. When flying close together, a plump. On the ground, a flock or gaggle and in water, just a gaggle.
Ducks in the water you ask. A paddlington.
Unless they are close together. Then they’re a raft.And coots? A floatila apparently. Guessing only when they are in water.
I thought a skein was a roll of wool
Rolled yarn is often referred to as a skein. I guess maybe it has two meanings, the posted one seems like it may be unpopular or archaic.
It has quite a lot of meanings
- A quantity of yarn, thread, etc. put up together in an oblong shape, after it is taken from the reel. A skein of cotton yarn is formed by eighty turns of the thread around a fifty-four inch reel.
- (figuratively) A web, a weave, a tangle.
- (zoology) The membrane of a fish ovary.
- (wagonmaking) A metallic strengthening band or thimble on the wooden arm of an axle.
- (zoology, UK, dialect, collective) A group of wild fowl (e.g. geese, goslings) when they are in flight.
- (sports) A winning streak.
- (radio, television, dated) A series created by a web (major broadcasting network).
never look up the meaning of the word, “run.”
In my experience a skein is a specific type of wound wool. It’s looped and then twisted and folded over. You can’t knit from a skein, you have to reball it first.
Dreich is a Scots word. Skein is too but I think it’s borrowed from Gaelic.
Zarf is Arabic, and plash is Dutch.
Old English plæsc. Possibly cognate of, but not borrowed from Dutch plas (puddle)
Zarf sounds like a Pinky adlib
Dreich is also used in Breton (another Celtic language).
I thought Scots is a Gaelic language. Am I missing something?
Scots is close enough to English that some scholars say it’s a dialect and others say it’s it’s own language.
A while back, a teenager wrote many of the articles on the Scots Wikipedia thinking it was just an accented English. It was a mess.
I gave up editing wikipedia years ago. My edits would be swamped with reverts and snarky comments because the information didn’t agree with intro textbooks. In at least one case it turns out an instructor was giving extra credit to students to “correct” information. The textbook they were using was deeply flawed of course. But there you are.
I remember reading that Wikipedia was just phase one of the project where draft articles were written. Phase two was a more formal project where experts would refine the draft articles and they would be peer reviewed. Unfortunately, production was slow and Wikipedia took off so the project was effectively abandoned after a few years. Too bad. What field were you writing in?
Neuroscience. I think the last straw was where I had a review article on a specialist topic rejected from a couple of fancy journals. Rather than rewrite it for a lower tier, I modified it for Wikipedia. It got insta-banned and I got scolded/black marked for plagiarism. It was truly a “but I am Pagliacci” moment. Nobody in the chat page believed it or seemed to want to listen.
Sorry to hear that. What a weird experience. Glad you removed yourself from a bad situation. Cheers!
Well you know the tenure treadmill. This was 15+ years ago so Wiki contributions weren’t counted towards professional activity. It literally wasn’t worth the effort given the other options. Cheers to you as well!
No, the two languages have separate roots. Gaelic is often called Scots Gaelic to distinguish it from Irish, though.
Thanks for that. My family immigrated from Scotland a billion years ago or so, and we were always told they spoke mostly Gaelic. When I look at the language map they were from the Gaelic speaking islands that I now know are part of the Goidelic language family. Scots is in the south and part of the Brittonic language family. I can see more reading ahead.
Scots is Germanic. Brittonic is a subfamily of Celtic languages that includes Welsh and Cornish.
I am getting dumber by the minute. lol.
A zarf is specifically the stand for a handleless coffee cup. It’s not a heat sleeve like the illustration.
Plash Speed
