A Collective Noun of Paragliders
Monday, March 12, 2012 at 20:50 Melissa Hope Ah, the off-season. There's not much local flying at this time of year, and even our kiting and slope soaring hills are pretty much unusable due to the amount of rain and mud. A lot of my paragliding friends have been travelling (Australia, Columbia, California...), but I'm grounded, saving for a trip to the Maritimes this summer. That leaves me lots of time to watch paragliding videos and think.
We need a collective noun for paragliders. You know: a murder of crows, a herd of cattle, a school of fish, a parliament of owls...
Picture by Mark Carter (Manilla, Australia)
The options I've heard most often are gaggle and flock, which do make sense given that we do resemble geese when we launch. Unfortunately, both words only properly apply to geese on the ground; geese in the air are a skein, a team, or a wedge, and none of those terms seem quite right. And one term that applies to paragliders both on the ground and in the air would be easier. For that same reason, I'm not especially fond of a flight, such as for storks and swallows, as it doesn't sound like it could be applied to us while we're on the ground.
We could name ourselves for hawks: a boil for when two or more are spiralling in flight or a kettle for when flying in large numbers. Or after eagles: a convocation of paragliders. Perhaps it is a little presumptuous to name ourselves after birds of prey, though.
Hang gliders sometimes call us jellyfish (all in good fun, of course), so perhaps we could adopt one of the collective nouns for jellyfish: fluther or smack... though a "smack of paragliders" has some unfortunate implications and a "fluther of paragliders" is just difficult to say.
Many collective nouns come from descriptions of a group's characteristics or habits of life, as in a singular of boars, a cackle of hyenas, or a vanity or a drunk of airplane pilots. Perhaps rather than simply name ourselves after another group, we should observe the characteristics of paragliders to choose something suitable.
Recently, Russ and I volunteered at the Outdoor Adventure Show for iParaglide, getting new people excited about free flight. Towards the end of the day, a bunch of our fellow pilots came by the booth and the conversation soon turned to everyone's newest toys: one person's new harness, another's new helmet with shiny visor, someone's new camera with helmet mount, another's new flight suit... there's always a new shiny coming out.
Our wings come in every colour of the rainbow and a fair number of combinations that Mother Nature did not come up with.
Finally, as a community, paragliders are camera-happy. We're very fond of taking pictures and video of ourselves and each other. We also love our gadgets, such as GPS trackers, varios, and all kinds of other tools, especially if they help us brag about our flights on the internet. Paragliders like their tech toys almost as much as computer geeks do. (I don't think it is a coincidence that there's a sizeable overlap between computer programmers and paragliders.)
Bringing together our love of shiny things, our use of bright colours, all our cameras, and our tendency as a community to attract outgoing personalities, I would like to propose we adopt the following as our collective noun: a flash of paragliders.
Reader Comments (2)
Love the entry Melissa - not so sure about the collective noun "flash"- to me that suggests a rather quick drop. I linked your listing us a "community" to commune. Many are slightly impoverished, most paragliders I know are very sharing, and we fly in small groups. This might be worth a WCSC contest. My submission would be a "commune" of paragliders.
Oooh, I could get behind a commune of paragliders too; nice one Sherida!