So. I have been a woman in search of a verb.
And together we have looked far and wide for ways to describe iguanas.
I need your help again.
Here’s the question.
This is what I asked the Twitter bar last week:
What’s the collective noun for an obscene number of open Firefox tabs? A bevy? A fluster? An impossibility? A span?
The public needs to know. Well, I need to know.
Here’s what I got.
Oh-so-many marvelous responses.
Including:
- A clutter of tabs
- A fandeck of tabs
- A crash of tabs
- A phlox of tabs
- An array of tabs
- A tabulation of tabs
- A Flaming Skulk of tabs (It’s just one guy!)
- A profusion of tabs
- A library of tabs
- A maelstrom of tabs
- A flock of tabs
- A rumpus of tabs (I quite approve of a rumpus of anything.)
- A smarmal of tabs
- An inferno of tabs
- A procrastination of tabs?
- An enthusiasm of tabs! (So true.)
- A spasm of tabs
- A smatter of tabs
- A spangle of tabs
- A bankruptcy of tabs
- A distraction of tabs !!!
- An obsession of tabs?
- A blustering hurricane of tabs (Another candidate for a Fake Band of the Week)
- A cluster of tabs
- A necessity of tabs!
- A flab of tabs
- A blaze of tabs !!!
- A clusterfuck of tabs
- A den of tabs
- A leak of tabs
- An overwhelm of tabs
- A slowdown of tabs
- A crash of tabs
- A conflagration of tabs
- A flurry of tabs
- An amassment of tabs.
It kind of reads like a poem.
Also suggested:
A tabillion tabs! Tabscenity. Tabpocolypse. And a Tabstravaganza.
I like it.
And the one that made me snicker:
From @StevenHowe: “A carton of tabs, surely.”
Yes.
Here’s what I want and need from you.
More suggestions!
Or: what are your favorites?
And!
I also have about seventeen billion (yes, monster-number) open TextEdit documents that are currently freaking me out through existing.
What’s the collective noun for THAT?
Please suggest.
A _______________ of TextEdits. Or a ___________________ of open documents?
Whatever you think sounds good.
Thank you!
And thanks to:
@revrendoni, @lisafirke, @amnaahmad, @jillian6475, @amthanna, @aronL, @jjlogs, @Cazzylina, @AardvarkPotions, @maclogue, @whynotdancing, @jneves, @martieu, @LeelaSinha, @jovanevery, @KaleenaRivera, @spiralsongkat, @mobiiart, @PokMcFee, @UncontainedLife, @JamesWester, @spiralshannon, @judespacks, @LoveWastingTime, @verso, @bswx, @phenom1984, @AlexisHelmrath, @BradenRussom, @HiroBoga, @angeladee, @jeremymyers, @fiona_robyn, @kirstenasimmons, @peetahb and @TBilich.
Suggestions are welcome.
Everything goes better in my life when I have the right word or the right metaphor.
Help is appreciated!
xox
Follow
A gaggle of tabs.
A spaghetti of tabs.
A plethora of TextEdits.
A Brittanica of TextEdits.
This may not be appropriate but I would probably use the phrase “a shit-ton” for both tabs & documents. (Hey, you allowed “clusterfuck”…)
I also like array, rumpus, & amassment. But tabillion, tabscenity, tabpocolypse, & tabstravaganza are genius! (Tabillion & tabstravaganza are my favorites.)
additional suggestions:
a browsing of tabs
a catalog of tabs
I don’t have thoughts yet about the open TextEdit docs, but I’ll come back and post again if any come up. 🙂
A tintinabulation of tabs?
An avalanche of TextEdits?
A bar of tabs.
(Because it’s literally a bar… and you can run up a tab at the bar!)
a Cascade of open documents
a Fog of open documents
an Abacus of TextEdits
an Opus of TextEdits
I very much like A Blaze of Tabs.
Oooh, a bar of tabs — I really like that! Tabstravaganza is also good. So many excellent suggestions!
Let’s see: an overdose of open documents? An operation of open docs? A data of docs?
about seventeen billion open TextEdit documents that are currently freaking me out through existing
sounds like
Shiva at play on the desktop
Ooo. An impossibility of tabs. I like that.
Tabscenity! Almost spewed coffee because of that one.
I tend to lean toward “tabstravaganza”, “enthusiasm”, “rumpus, or “flight” when the tabs are really awesome things I want to read or look at YAY!
And of course, if it’s all work-related research and I-should-read-this and webmastery control windows and not finding the bit I needed even after ten Google searches and ARGH then I lean toward “overwhelm”, “tabpocolypse”, “impossibility”, or “impending doom”.
“I can’t come watch a movie right now. I have an impending doom of tabs open.”
–corollary–
I wonder what kind of creature a tab is? Is it like a lion or a dormouse? Is it like a manticore or a pixie? Is it like a lemming, a locust, a wolf, or a rabbit? Because then I could borrow the collective noun from that creature and think of them when I open and close tabs. (an ostentation of tabs! A murder of tabs! (eek) A pride of tabs!)
I wonder if tabs have classes, like in D&D. This tab is a monk, and these three are barbarians, and this one’s a rogue, and here’s a couple of merchants, a crafter, and one poor shepherd, who were all on a pilgrimage together when Things Got Interesting. TOGETHER THEY FIGHT EVIL. (Except the rogue. Mostly he just loots evil’s corpse and tags along with the rest of the group because of their high potential for profitable mayhem, the great booze the barbarians always seem to carry, and he thinks the monk is hysterical.)
If I explore the “grouping tabs together” thingy that the kids are talking about these days, odds are good that this will be how I group them: by their characters. Maybe “Smiths” (crafting forums) “Priests” (spiritual and religious and woo-woo blogs) “Warlords” (news & politics) “Scholars” (search engines, wikipedia, thesaurus, etc.) “Pirates” (shopping) etc.
–tangent–
The “having a schmillion text-y things to edit at once” problem used to drive me bonkers. So many things! Now I use Scrivener, drop them all in one project, and can swap text between them, and switch their order around, and jump from piece to piece the way my creative non-linear brain seems to naturally want to do. (It also has a “spread colored index cards on the carpet” mode. ::glee::)
A proof of text edits, a font of text edits, a press of text edits…..
I usually go with the (all purpose for me) “mess of” (though my mother has corrected me on multiple occasions about that one LOL, one might say a mess of corrections)
A cascade of tabs, a scale of tabs (like musical scales), a stitch of tabs, a scarf of tabs, a patchwork of tabs
🙂
Did you know that in Firefox 6 (maybe others) that you can “pin” tabs you use all the time? Control click a tab, select “pin as app tab” and then it shrinks your tab so it’s just the icon. Might not be useful for everyone, but I love this for the tabs I always have open since now they take up far less tab real estate.
I also have 3 textedit docs open right now. Which I could close, but will save me time later if I don’t. 🙂
A plethora of tabs, or textedit docs.
An inundation of documents. Or flood… Have water on the brain after yesterday.
A flurry of docs. A swamp of docs. A maelstrom of docs.
…a possibility of tabs (or open text edits)?
Which you can then qualify with the appropriate adjective, like
“I have an exciting possibility of tabs here” or
“now there is a confusing possibility of tabs” or
“in fact there is now a slightly absurd and somewhat overwhelming and terrifying possibility of tabs on my desktop”.
@carey, hilarious! Your description of the rogue sounds exactly Corporal Nobby Nobbs. Going to reread my discworld novels!!
Maybe it depends on whether the tabs and textedit docs are for something fun/positive/interesting/desirable or for something burdensome-but-necessary.
A burden of documents, a necessity of tabs…
A fair of tabs, a carnival of docs…
Mystical numbers: Bad-illion of the burdensome ones, a Good-illion of the interesting ones…
My all-purpose collective noun is “raft”; any more than a raft of the darn things, whatever they are, and I’ll sink.
A Looming of TextEdits.
A deluge of docs!
How could I have missed that before?
A Tarnation of Tabs
A congestion of tabs,
A capharnaum of documents or a nevralgia if that amount is painful for you 🙂
I veer towards Plethora. It could be tabs or texts, or almost anything of which you have too many.
Also, turn Overwhelm into a descriptor – an Overwhelm of tabs or texts.
They could also be a Cacaphony of tabs or texts. After all, they’re making a horrific noise trying to get noticed!!!
They also could be lurking in packs – as in a Pack of tabs or texts. And they howl very loudly when they get together! Awrooooooooooo!
your ‘Circus Board’
Such fun! Some super great word suggestions.
My desktop is generally a flux of windows, which usually feature a snarl of open documents.
I often struggle with a glut (sometimes a bounty) of tabs (stepping stones!) that mass in ever expanding profusion.
A bottleneck of text edits is common, though they are also often found in torrents.
I am thinking Plethora. But Maelstrom is good, too. Am on the same tab as Claire.
A tome! A tome of TextEdits.
I like maelstrom of tabs, and also cascade of tabs, very much.
What about an explosion of tabs? Like the explosion of ideas that made them! This works for TextEdits too.
Some sillier words that are similar: a fracas of textedits, a hullabaloo of documents, a brouhaha of tabs. A proliferation of documents?
I like the tabpocalypse and a tabulation of tabs. The crash of tabs might be a little too apt, it brings back memories of my computer crashing because I had twelve billion tabs open in various windows.
Also shimmer geek is brilliant with the bar of tabs.
A conflagration of text edits?
Favorite tab names from above: array, maelstrom, spasm, smatter, flurry
I’m also fond of maelstrom for open docs. If you want to get all alliterative up in here, you can do:
A tizzy of TextEdits
A triumph of TextEdits
A totality of TextEdits
or…
An overwhelm of open docs
An obscenity of open docs
An oligarchy of open docs (it doesn’t make much sense but it’s a fun word to say!)
An oscillation of open docs (if you go flipping through them a lot to find the right one)
Have fun!
Personally I like…
A flurry of tabs – makes me think snowflakes, or the confetti that gets shot into the air at the end of concerts
An avalanche of TextEdits/documents
I like so many of these suggestions! I call my own TextEdit craziness “a Courier of TextEdits” but that’s mostly because I’m a font fiend. My open docs are a “novelty of documents” because I can interpret that word in a few different ways to make it nonthreatening or quite serious, depending on what I need at the moment. Additionally, they’re different because I use TextEdit for a different type of writing than my regular app (Atlantis – love the sea sounds that come with it!), with which I write my stories.
In the sillier realm, I’d throw “a nuthatch of tabs” into the pot.
If you’re an especially tab-tastic user of Firefox (and isn’t that one of the reasons we love it?), you can not only pin tabs, as Claire notes above, but you can now group them together.
Behold: http://support.mozilla.com/en-US/kb/what-are-tab-groups
Pretty awesome!
You picked my tabscenity and tabstravaganza! Thanks!
Though I think nuthatch is clearly a top candidate.
I don’t know if this counts as a proper collective noun, but! When I woke up this morning, I had this great image of the tabs and textedit documents as barnacles stuck to the side of your pirate ship. I like it because I think of tabs and documents as representing ideas and projects that are still growing, but sometimes they are too many and too cluttered and you need to scrape the barnacles off the ship and back into the water where they belong.
Maybe you could say that you have a Barnacle Infestation?
PS I just read your post on explosions and realized just HOW MUCH an explosion of tabs is not a nice metaphor for you. I’m sorry!