Posted by Marc BailesIf you have a wide variety of things and need to bring them all together with just one word, try menagerie. It applies to a collection, but only a very diverse one. Seashells in general might not fit the bill. Unless you’re talking about a large collection that has large ones and small ones, old and new, gathered from beaches near and far.
Originally, the only things being collected were animals. And a menagerie wasn’t much of a mixture at all. In fact, it was a bunch of animals of one particular type, gathered for a specific purpose, like an exhibit.
Consider the same word in modern French, where it’s occasionally used to mean “zoo,” though in a figurative sense. The convenience of a menagerie was that they could be eat and sleep together and be trained on the same schedule. This was all a convenient way of housing a group of animals. Housing is the key part, and it’s the root of menagerie. Even in modern French, ménage means housework or a household. Listen carefully and you’ll hear that ménage is related to mansion, another household word. So the focus shifted from people to animals, from animals of one type to a zoo, from a zoo to diverse collection of anything.
Photo courtesy of Animated Picturebook.com
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