Andy Richardson: Word up - what are we crowing about?

Brring brring, brrring brrring. We’re going to have to get a phone with a sexier ring tone. We’re thinking Skrillex and Diplo’s collaboration with Justin Bieber, Where Are U Now, might be the dialtone for us.

Then again, that might not go down well with the guy who writes obituaries and sits at the next desk. Hmm. We’ll have to think more about that one.

But I digress.

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We’re avowed fans of Richard, Sheffield’s lachrymose crooner, and we answered the call quicker than a DJ making a useless pun about his mother-in-law.

As we listened attentively, Richard chatted amiably about his present album, the sublime Holly Meadows, and the slew of accompanying dates.

He ruminated on the making of the album then said something unusual. It was this: “Just then, a murder of crows flew over my house.”

We paused. “A murder of crows, Richard?”

“That’s right, a murder of crows.”

He confirmed the description emphatically, as though we’d asked a really daft question; as though everybody in the world knows that the correct term for a sky full of crows is ‘murder’. Erm, thanks, Rock God.

We checked to see whether Richard was gilding the lily and whether the correct term wasn’t something more prosaic, like a flight, a flock or a rookery. We’d have forgiven Richard if it had been.

After all, gilding the lily is his job. Lyricists write stuff that makes us view life differently; they can take as much poetic licence as they wish, even when they’re talking about crows.

Richard, however, was spot on. Like Stephen Fry on Celebrity Mastermind, he was using the correct collective noun to describe a group of squawky black birds. In a world full of cocaine-sniffing, Jack Daniels-drinking, groupie-loving, skinny-jean-wearing rock stars, Richard proved himself to be the class swot. He was more JK Rowling than Rolling Stone, more Sir William Golding than Sir Paul McCartney.

Perhaps we shouldn’t have been so surprised by his intellectualism. After all, the world of entertainment is full of former teachers who made it onto the stage. The tongue-flicking, make-up wearing Kiss guitarist Gene Simmons was a one-time English teacher. He got booted out of class after ditching Shakespeare for Spider-Man comics in lessons.

Others have made the transition from the halogen lights of school to the bright lights of showbusiness. Sting taught English at a convent school, Art Garfunkel ditched his job as a maths teacher when Bridge Over Troubled Water went to number one, JK Rowling taught English in Portugal and Mr T, Sylvester ‘Rambo’ Stallone, Stephen King and Da Vinci Code author Dan Brown all got down with their pupils.

There have been others.

American comic Billy Crystal worked as a supply teacher while doing stand-up at night, the brilliant Gabriel Byrne taught in Dublin before becoming one of the Usual Suspects, Brian May taught maths before teaming up with Ready Steady Freddie to form Queen while Sheryl Crow taught music at elementary school before deciding that all she wanted to do was sing. And when Sheryl, her sister and their mum got together, they obviously became a murder of Crows too. Though they didn’t fly over Richard’s house.

Richard’s masterful use of the English language led us on another, more interesting tangent: we wondered whether there were other collective nouns more interesting than his?

Like budding Dave Gormans, we turned detective, looking at the writings of 15th century scholars to find out the correct terms for various groups.

The results were simultaneously accurate and hilarious: for instance, a bevy of ladies, a superfluity of nuns, a hastiness of cooks and a pity of pensioners. Animal terms were spot on: a shrewdness of apes, a sloth of bears, a glaring of cats, a cloud of gnats, a bloat of hippopotami and a knot of toads.

Our favourite, however, was this: a destruction of wild cats.

Toby, the office’s resident clever bloke and half-decent wordsmith, was non-plussed. We love Toby. He doesn’t say much, but when he speaks, we listen. That’s why he wins all the awards. And that’s why his secret-but-not-so-secret-nickname-anymore is ‘The Oracle’.

Toby did what all creative types do: invented a bunch of his own. They went above and beyond the brilliance of Richard’s original murder. “Celebrities would be easy,” he said.

“Tell us, Toby, what would it be?”

He offered erudition: “You’d have a pomposity of celebrities, a bonus of bankers, an expense of politicians, a hack of journalists and a denial of alcoholics.”

Ha, not even a Bono of rock stars can come up with stuff that good.