why use "school" to calculate the fish?

0Hi,02br
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01font00a school of fish? Why not "a herd of fish" or "A pile of fish"?02font02br
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00It's just the common term. 02br
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00In his book, An Exaltation of Larks, James Lipton suggests it may be the result of a very old confusion over the more reasonable term 01font

0Some other interesting names for a particular group of animals:02br
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00a pride of lions02br
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00a raft of otters02br
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00a pod of whales02br
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00a parliament of crows02br
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00an unkindness of ravens0-

0 I always thought that it was a murder of crows.02br
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00 Anyways, the group naming thing in English really doesn't make much sense and I honestly don't know most of them. Only the common ones. Alot of them are very rarely used because you can replace any of the words you don't know with 'A group of'. The naming is based on how the animals/people/objects are grouped

0 When I learned about all the aninal collections I was told that was more a kind of joke. Oxford dictionary tells they were taken up by John Sturt for a sports journal (1801). Surely it is quite humourous (if not ridiculous) to have a different group name for every popular species?! Most of the terms never had nor have any real currency, so no hassle to learn them, at least for a non-native!0

0 The measure words are actually a very important part of the English language to describe things which you cannot count. Like for example;02br
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00 A litre of water. 02br
00 A bucket of water. 02br
00 A glass of water.02br
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00 or02br
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00 A few people.02br
00 A crowd of people.02b