In addition to traditional collage and drawing, I've been interested lately in the way that words can be used as collage elements. I particularly like words from lists and catalogs. I'm sure this corresponds to my interest in wildlife guide books and encyclopedias in my pictorial collages.
On the one hand, a list lets an item stand on it's own, showing only its inherent meanings and associations (or what meanings we bring to the item), without influence of a surrounding "sentence", whether that be verbal or visual. But on the other hand, lists have this great flaw in that the items are not standing on their own, instead they are put next to other items. The reason is usually some form of empirical ordering, and is almost never aesthetically considered. This is where the "hands off" spirit of minimalism seems to pop up. I love the intersection of idiosyncratic associations of a list's items with its impersonal structure.
I stumbled upon a list on Wikipedia that I think embodies this pretty well. "List of animal names" shows the words for young, female, male, group, adjective, and meat for many animals. The names for groups are always fun, (a gaggle of geese, a mob of kangaroos...) but there were a few surprises. Who knew that a group of aardvarks were called an "aarmory"? Clever. I also liked: a kaleidoscope of butterflies, a business of ferrets, and a buffoonery of orangutans.
Even more than the group names I enjoyed the adjectives. These are words that usually mean "like or pertaining to" a certain type of animal. Some common ones are canine, avian, feline, bovine. But some the lesser known ones are really great. Some of my favorites: tolypeutine = armadillo-like, columbine = dove-like, vulpine = fox-like, and iki = sloth-like.
I'm not sure if I'll ever get the chance to use any of these words in conversational speech, but it's good to know that they're there if I need them. I could say, "This is a hystricine blog."