A mere three decades ago, engineers and chemists were the dominant species at environmental meetings. It was, after all, their natural habitat and one which they had dominated - albeit imperfectly - for well over a century. The only lawyer you would meet at those environmental meetings was Henry Landis, then staff counsel for the Ontario Water Resources Commission. This, of course, was in the ancient regime - when engineers quite literally surveyed all they ruled - which peaked around 1969 B.C. (Before CELA - the Canadian Environmental Law Association, founded in a spirit of pro bono publico), long before the commission became the environment ministry.

Environmental lawyers in this milieu were then so rare they would now be thought of as an endangered species. But the lawyers obeyed the Biblical injunction to go out and multiply. And multiply they did, with a vengeance. The traditional environmental disciplines - chemistry, civil and chemical engineering - trained in more passive research and scholarship, found they had no natural defences against the new legal marauders whose keen intellects were trained in combative rhetoric and unmatched knowledge of the legal terrain. After all, how many engineers and chemists are there in our legislatures? You might need gas chromatography to locate one. How many lawyers are also lawmakers? You might need a computer to count them.

Having also penetrated governments, lawyers are able to make laws as well as argue cases. So, like the Roman Legions, who also brought good roads and the rule of law to conquered territories, the new breed of lawyers challenged powerful corporate polluters, many of whom had been immune to environmental regulation. Until recently Latin was essential to legal training. Indeed, such phrases as onus probandi, habeas corpus and caveat emptor are, paradoxically, linguistic remnants of the Roman conquests which brought the rule of law.

But once lawyers had entered the environmental field, like many new species entering ecosystems, they had few natural enemies, or to phrase it more accurately, few enemies who were effective. Today, if you were to randomly throw a stick in any environmental conference, the odds are very good that your missile would connect with a lawyer.

We attempted to prove this theory under controlled conditions but failed when it was noted that some researchers, mostly engineering students, were actually aiming the sticks at lawyers. When challenged, one of the culprits said he had aimed at the lawyers because there were no journalists in the audience. Impudent? Yes, but he had a point which will emerge later.

The incident led to a realization that there is no collective noun for a group of lawyers. We have a pride of lions, a flock of sheep, a school of fish and even an unkindness of ravens. For humans we have a bevy of beauties, but no collective noun for lawyers. This is surprising really for the law is not only one of the oldest learned professions but also the one with the best disposition for verbal rhetoric.

In 1994, a British newspaper fearlessly tackled the delicate issue of collective nouns for another profession, the oldest one in fact. Now I believe that truly great newspapers attract readers whose biting satire and insights match those of professional scriveners. The international edition of The Manchester Guardian seems to have a plethora of talented readers who respond to various absurd scenarios that seem so abundant in the British Isles.

For example, when the British Wolfenden Committee's study on homosexual offences was nearing completion in 1957, it was realized that there was no collective noun for a group of prostitutes. Reader Michael Robyns, of New Zealand, wrote that the committee went to that citadel of correct English usage, the BBC, where they sought the elusive collective noun for prostitutes from various experts.

Television cook Philip Harben was said to have responded with: "What about a tray full of tarts?" Sir Malcolm Sargent, the eminent conductor, riposted with "a fanfare of strumpets," while the then poet laureate, John Masefield, being steeped in literature, amongst other things, offered "an anthology of prose," or "a novel of trollops."

Appropriately, a lawyer had the last word on the matter. It was recounted that the committee then turned despairingly to Sir Hartley Shawcross, who had been the attorney general and a prosecutor at the Nuremburg Trials. With a lawyer's caution he declined to help, but with a brilliant, but pointed thrust, he warned: "Call them anything you like, but not on any account, a firm of solicitors."

For the fourth estate, a collective noun - the scrum - recently evolved for those journalists who jostle around celebrities. After watching our U.S. brethren frantically cover the O. J. Simpson trial, I think it might be appropriate to leave out the r, which ironically makes it a four letter word.

N.B. The Guardian publishes an international edition which combines articles from Le Monde, The Washington Post and The Guardian. The Notes & Queries column, by Joseph Harker of The Guardian, regularly attracts an unequalled range of witty anecdotes from around the globe.