Seeking a Collective Noun

If it’s “school of fish” and “raft of ducks,”
Then what would the grouping-word be for schmucks?
“A swarm of schmucks” is sweet to say.
To “box of schmucks” I’ll not say nay.
“Cohort” and “legion” have classical rings,
And “chorus” would work, if the schmucks like to sing.
Yet puzzling’s done. It’s time to say fuck it:
I think I’ll be taking my schmucks by the bucket;
For “a bucket of schmucks” is a barrel of laughs,
Almost as good as “a tower of giraffes.”

Author: Harry Miller

I have traveled and lived in Taiwan, China, and Japan and am now a professor of Asian history and author of Southern Rain, a novel of seventeenth-century China.

5 thoughts on “Seeking a Collective Noun”

Leave a Reply

Fill in your details below or click an icon to log in:

WordPress.com Logo

You are commenting using your WordPress.com account. Log Out /  Change )

Facebook photo

You are commenting using your Facebook account. Log Out /  Change )

Connecting to %s

%d bloggers like this: