Dear Readers,

A group of lions hunting in the jungle is called a pride, a group of fish gathering off Damariscove is a school, and the proper name for the dozens of big black birds perching in the big hemlock up the hill is a murder of crows.

Trust me, I am not making this up.

These words are called collective nouns, according to Sister Francis David, my sainted high school English teacher. Later I learned they had another, more elegant name: nouns of assemblage.

Some of these nouns are a bit colorful and descriptive. Like a “parliament of owls,” “a knot of toads,” or my favorite, an “exaltation of larks.”

On the Mill Pond, you say “a gaggle of geese.” In flight, it is “a skein of geese.” When they flock together on shore, especially when gathering on the front lawn of your shore front cottage, they are called “a mess,” or worse.

The dozens and dozens of wild turkeys that visit my backyard to exhume the leavings from the bird feeder (and the cracked corn pitched to them by my bride) buried under the snow, is officially “a rafter of turkeys.” Sometimes they fly up on the deck and knock the seed out of the feeder. When I shoo them away, they kind of give me the evil eye. I get the idea they are looking at me as food.

In 1968, James Lipton, the current host of the PBS favorite “Inside the Actor's Studio,” collected many of these terms in a book called “An Exaltation of Larks: Or, the Venereal Game.”

Of course, Lipton, in his well-known sense of wry humor, included (or invented?) other terms like: “a babble of barbers,” “a lie of golfers,” “a lot of used car dealers,” “a gulp of cormorants” and a “rhapsody of blues.”

So, as we all sit around nursing the sore shoulders we earned from flinging snow from the  porch, the front walk or the driveway, and between bouts of praying the power does not go out, we have a lot of time to think of words to describe the weather.

No, I do not mean the words used by excited TV presenters to scare us into watching their offerings. Actually, to be correct, Lipton says we should call them “a shower of meteorologists,” or “a scoop of reporters.”

The showers and scoops use the same cliches and phrases I assume they have copied from each other, to warn us another Arctic Express or Alberta Clipper is heading our way to ruin our rosebushes; shouldn't they try to be a bit more creative in their language?

How about telling us we face a “snarling smattering of snowstorms” “a burring of blizzards,” “a trashing of thermometers” or “a wilding of wind chills?”

Next to the back door you might find “a bundle of boots,” and “a slough of shovels.” Outside “a pounding of plows” tries to push back “a dangerous daunting of devilish drifts.”

Come on, showers and scoops, let’s do a bit of word-smithing to fill the latest time slot.

I know, we all have to do something to pass the time as we are stuck in the cabin waiting for the “wandering wicked winds of winter” to abate.

I prefer to dream about the future.

All agree this has been “a wonder of winter” for the record books. One factoid that describes our season was explained to me by a prominent East Boothbay man who went down to Freeport to exchange an item and found L.L. Bean was out of snowshoes.

As I sit at my computer and ponder the future, I am warmed by my long johns and the thought that “a posse of pitchers” and “a clutch of catchers” will report to the Red Sox spring training facility in Fort Myers, Florida on Friday, Feb. 20.

Can spring be far behind? Please say it is so.

P.S. Go Lady Seahawks. Win State.