Gail Collins Uses Correct Term For Group Of Walruses

Gail Collins is my favorite op-ed columnist at the New York Times. As much as I admire her, I’ll never forgive her for describing House Republicans as a “herd of rabid otters” in a column earlier this year. (Only because there’s no such thing as a “herd” of otters. The analogical image itself is impressively accurate.) So I was very happy today when she again went zoological in her writing, but this time got her terms straight.

“At the ritual Congressional lashing of C.E.O.’s this week, we learned that none of the major oil companies have any idea how to control a spill like this, and that their faux plans for handling one in the gulf were made up of boilerplate so undigested that several had sections on protecting walruses — mammals that have not been seen in the area since the Ice Age. “It’s unfortunate that walruses were included,” admitted Exxon Mobil’s chief. The way things have been going, you can’t be too careful. If the portents keep piling up, it’s easy to envision a headline like: ‘Lone Tourist in Pensacola Eaten by Visiting Walrus Herd.’”

Yes: walruses are indeed collected in a herd! (They can also be collected in a “pod” or a “huddle.”) Thank you, Gail Collins! And also thank you for the line about a “man-eating pterodactyl” crashing through the windows in the oval office that made me smile and, most of all, for the point at the end of the piece: That while Obama may have won the presidency through rousing oratorical flare, his tone in governing is much more deliberative, even “boring,” and that while this often has the hysterical media calling for his head, his achievements thus far prove it to be a good thing.

More importantly, here’s some video from National Geographic of walruses (the narrator calls the group a “pack,” which sounds okay to me, though it is not listed on Webster’s animal group/collective names styleguide page) fighting for space on a melting ice floe.