Chicken strips are one of the only reliable things offered by my day job’s cafeteria. They aren’t any good, but they’re the same each time I get them, so they’re reliable, and they always require ketchup. I’ve come to collect the packets in my desk. Well, 'collection' implies that I've been doing it purposefully, and this isn't so much a willing collection as it is a perpetual motion brain machine hiccup. I overestimate how many I will need, throw the unused ones in a drawer because it feels wrong to toss them, and promptly forget I’ve done so. Then, next time, I get some more. And I overestimate how many I will need. Rinse, repeat.
Once it became apparent that I have a small colony of ketchup packets living in my desk drawer, it crossed my mind that I should call it something. Not Ketchupville, or anything like that. It needed to be quantified, because it had grown past the point of simply being “a handful of packets” and I am too stubborn to thrown any of them, unopened, into the trash. My brain tried to process this, starting with the basics.
Firstly, why did I feel the need to have word for this? That one’s easy: I need a word because I have a lot of ketchup packets, I don’t want to throw them out, and the bizarre inanimate-object-empathizer part of me demands that I make it so… which leads me right into question two. Aren’t “a lot” or even “several” good enough? I just called it a colony a few lines up, didn’t I? Can’t it be that? This is the one I’m having the most trouble with, and after three days of unproductive deliberation, I’ve resigned myself to the fact that it’s simply more fun to come up with some egregious term for a cluster (another perfectly good word that won’t do) of ketchup packets.
Because, I realize, it’s just that. It’s ketchup. It’s one of the most innocuous things out there, as condiments go. It’s everywhere. It’s been around forever. It deserves a really odd word.
So, where to begin? I had a pocket full of the latest additions to the cluster-colony of Ketchupville and my mind was off in the animal kingdom. A pride of lions. A school of fish. A flock of birds. “Flock of Ketchup” sounds pretty good, but also too much like a middle school garage band on a Disney Channel program.
Then I started going for the weirder ones, like a bike of ants, which is a real thing that I did not make up. There are the ones that seem almost redundant – a glaring of cats, for instance, which is one of the most appropriate collective nouns I’ve ever read, and which gets upgraded to a Destruction if they’re feral. There are the array of hedgehogs, the scourge of mosquitoes, and then, of course, the murder of crows and the unkindness of ravens. I tested all of them and more. And finally, after pattering around and imagining ants riding bicycles, I found it: a Glooming of ketchup.
Doesn’t it sound nice? Not as malicious as a Murder or Unkindness, but gives an appropriately foreboding air to something as bland as packets of ketchup. Beware, it says, of my blandness. Beware my love affair with your clothing. Beware the glooming of ketchup.
While I sat back, smiling to myself and adding more packets to my glooming, I realized there was one inherent flaw in my thinking. It wasn’t, surprisingly, “Why am I putting so much energy into something so utterly ridiculous?” No, it was “Well, now that that’s settled, what do I call a pile/cluster/colony/flock of mustard packets?”
I went through a similar thought process for these, so I’ll spare you. To quantify them, as that was my original goal, I define these terms as being “any number of packets that are more than a comfortable handful and less than the carton, tray, box, or bin from whence they came.”
So, I present, for your consideration:
A glooming of ketchup,
A shrewdness of mustard,
A flight of mayonnaise, and finally,
A brood of relish.
I did cursory searches of all of these terms; as whole units, they do not seem to exist yet, until I hit Publish, of course.
People of the Internet, you know what to do.
-Emma
