The following excerpt is from A View to a Death in the Morning by Matt Cartmill. My sister sent me the excerpt and said the book’s aim was to “trace the history of the symbolism of hunting (mostly in the West) and changes in humanity’s understanding of nature as it relates to hunting, so as to examine the historical precedents of the theory that hunting is what made man man, distinguished from nature in his tendency toward violence (popularly known as the theory of ‘Man the Hunter’).” So cool!
The fantastic and amusing terms that Elizabethan huntsmen applied to groupings of different species—a sloth of bears, an exaltation of larks, a trip of goats, a richesse of martens—are familiar today to lovers of quaint words. Every other aspect of aristocratic hunt also afforded a different lexicon for each species of game. For example, a male fallow deer during its first six years of life was known successively as a fawn, pricket, sorel, sore, buck of the first head, and buck, while the corresponding terms for a red deer were calf, brocket, spade, staggart, stag, and hart…The unhappy hunter who used the wrong pronoun to the dogs, called a brocket a pricket, or said “raise” when he meant “rouse” seldom escaped with mere derision. A public spanking with the flat of a hunting knife was the customary penalty for many such misuses of ritual language—for example, uttering the forbidden word “hedgehog” during a deer hunt.
pg 64–65
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