A Shrewdness Of Apes

Collective nouns are the wisdom teeth of the English language. They all mean "a group of", so they're totally redundant to everyone except poets, people who make crossword puzzles for a living and people like me who like to show off.

The few that made it into the popular lexicon fast became cliches: "a school of fish", I'm talking to you. Neil Gaiman's Sandman series first turned me on to "a murder of crows" and my favourites today are still the really dramatic ones: "an ambush of tigers", "an obstinacy of buffalo", "a destruction of wildcats", etc.