In fact, most of the English "terms of venery", the collective nouns for groups of animals, have been simply made up with a rather obvious humorous intent. It is a testament to some sort of linguistic OCD disorder to keep insisting that these are actual terms- I doubt anybody has ever practically referred to groups of ferrets as "businesses", groups of owls as "parliaments", groups of hyenas as "cowardices" or groups of butterflies as "kaleidoscopes". These terms are not born of usage and have basically only ever served as displays of erudition. It would be time for the English language to recognize they're just made up and pointless.
Yes, but made up as conventions between people who need a practical way of communicating something. If there is no such need, and the names are not practical for communication, it's more of an in-joke.
Somehow this reminds me of the Borges' tale "Funes the memorious". Being blessed or cursed with a prodigious and absolutely infallible memory, Funes invents his own numeration system which simply assigns to each number a different, arbitrary word from the dictionary. He claims that saying "Napoleon", for example, is way faster than "one thousand two hundred seventy six".
Apparently the invention and usage of ultra-specific collective nouns for animals (related to hunting) was fashionable in courts in the 14th and 15th century [1].
Most of the sources about collective nouns refer to the "Book of Saint Albans" as the origin of a large number of them [2]. But the book was meant to humorous, and includes collective nouns even for groups of people: "a superfluity of nuns", "a melody of harpers", "a doctrine of doctors", etc.
I imagine it was a fashionable court game to recite all the hilarious collective names for a vast number of animals and professions. Still, completely pointless from the point of view of communication.
