| All language is "random stuff arbitrary people make up". "Rules" are just discovered patterns in the arbitrariness of language, convenient ways to capture and communicate how most people within a certain linguistic context express a certain idea. They are point-in-time observations of an evolving natural system, sharing much more in common with aphorisms like "April showers bring May flowers" than with the law of gravity or the tax code. The English language is whatever English speakers and hearers agree it is. No linguistic "authority" can stop the inexorable evolution of language. (Language evolution has dramatically slowed, but that's because of the printing press, the radio, the television, and the Internet creating massively larger and more durable linguistic communities than ever existed before, not because of authority.) And to the original point of this thread... all of these so-called names for groups are nonsense. "A group of owls is called a parliament"... by whom? No one ever. Thus a group of owls is not called a parliament or a stare or a hoot or anything else cute. A group of owls doesn't have a name because owls don't form groups. In the unlikely event someone discovered a large group of owls together, I am quite certain they would call it a "flock", no matter what someone who thought they were clever wrote in a book. Yeah, this is a trigger for me. (: Dr. Geoff Lindsey is a great reference. Another is John McWhorter, specifically his books The Power of Babel and Words on the Move. Linguists are scientists of the natural world, not law-makers. |
Yes, that's a the descriptive rules. They are useful for people who are interested in understanding how the language works or for people who just want to be more effective at communicating.
But then there are also "prescriptive rules", which are rules that don't necessarily reflect how the language works but are rather about how the language "ought to work". These are useful for people who want to create a distinction between an in-group and out-group, or generally just want to preserve how things used to be in the golden days of when they were young (or so they think).