In honor of April Fool’s Day, I’m adding a new section to my series of blogs on The Devil’s Dictionary for IT and IT Security. (See previous entries here, here and here).
You’ve probably heard of specialized collective nouns for specific animals – for example:
- A pride of lions
- An exaltation of larks
- A flock of seagulls
In addition to these generally accepted examples, some rather inventive collective nouns have also been proposed for specific professions. I’m pretty sure these are just tongue-in-cheek – but I do find them amusing:
- A balance of accountants
- A rash of dermatologists
- A brace of dentists
For more examples, see https://users.tinyonline.co.uk/gswithenbank/collnoun.htm — especially the “Some That Might Be” section at the very bottom.
Just for fun, I’ve made up several collective nouns that might apply to roles or topics in information security:
- A network of administrators
- An incident of security analysts
- A deficiency of auditors
- A rogue of database administrators
- A patch of vulnerabilities
- A persistence of threats
- A mess of phishes
- An annoyance of spam
- A prick of injections
- A clique of malvertising
- A hostage of ransomware
- A malignancy of malware
- A cloak of rootkits
- An inconvenience of passwords
- An apathy of end-user license agreements
- An entitlement of personal devices
Maybe you have a good one to suggest – I’d love to hear about it!
Finally, here’s a final entry that we’re all working hard to ensure does not resonate because it happens to contain a kernel of truth: an irrelevance of CISOs.
Happy April Fool’s Day, everyone.
