And then there's ridiculous ones, like "a murder of crows", that many people know because they're ridiculous, but people still don't use them.
And then there's a ton that almost nobody knows, and nobody uses.
In the end, it's not a big deal. Unlikely Japanese, where they really do use counters for those kinds of object. Flat things like paper, cylindrical things like beer bottles, etc etc.
https://www.audubon.org/news/no-its-not-actually-murder-crow...
To be fair, Japanese has "everday use" counters and "trivia TV show" counters.
Obviously the standard usage of a “piece of paper” is pretty arbitrary, but slice is clearly wrong.
But, yeah, if you told me to pick up some eggs and a a carton/box of beer, I'd know what you probably wanted. (In the latter case, I might ask if you wanted a 6-pack, 12-pack, or 24.)
Because nobody in the UK bothers with group nouns except for a very few (herd of cows, for instance).
Yes.
Usually size comes first: big red metal ball.
red big metal ball sounds wrong to me and so do metal red ball and red metal big ball.
But I'm not sure if it can be succinctly expressed as a general rule. It's just something that native speakers do without thinking, seeing it written in the wrong order or hearing it said in the wrong order just feels wrong to me. Perhaps a linguist could provide a rule, or at least a rule of thumb.
I read an interesting article about it a few weeks ago, b̶u̶t̶ ̶I̶ ̶c̶a̶n̶'̶t̶ ̶f̶i̶n̶d̶ ̶i̶t̶. (Edit: wccrawford linked it: https://www.audubon.org/news/no-its-not-actually-murder-crow...) There's a quote from a biologist who studies wombats about the supposedly-correct collective noun for a group of wombats: "Wombats do not form groups in the wild."
And it is a pod of dolphins: https://www.dolphins-world.com/what-is-a-dolphin-pod/
A loaf of bread, a grain of rice, a slice of cheese.
These tend to be common everyday words but if you get them wrong things sound quite off.
