Discussion Forum—A Way with Words, a fun radio show and podcast about language

I have slowly been getting caught up on past shows and recently heard an episode that brought up collective nouns, and I wanted to share my new favorite example. I teach in a high school that offers the International Baccalaureate (IB) Diploma in which I teach the only course all students are required to take -- Theory of Knowledge (part applied philosophy and part epistemology). One day I saw my students, all in a group, approaching my classroom. On arrival, I told them we needed a collective name for a group of IB students. One of them immediately suggested that a group of IB students was a "Think." The name stuck, and last spring I saw the latest group walking to lunch and remarked "It's a Think of IB students." One of them said, "Yes, and there's a stray Thought back there (pointing to a student who had fallen behind the rest of the group)!"