A Wad of Men

Ms. Dominique tweets:  

I was at book launching party last year for a friend who had just gotten her poetry book published. She is the “Southern belle” type and flirts constantly and perhaps unconsciously with everyone—male or female. While I was talking to her, she suddenly saw a guy across the room and said, “I have to say hello to my friend who’s standing over there in that wad of men.”

I was surprised by this odd expression, mostly because, while I have lived in Arkansas and Tennessee, I had never heard this particular Southernism before. But when I asked my Southern friends, they had all heard this expression (okay, I lived in Northern Arkansas). 

In the Old South, a group of men is called a “wad.”

One of my male friends explained it to me this way:

Fish travel in a “school”

Geese move in a “gaggle”

Sheep come in a “flock” or sometimes even in a “mob”

Cows come in a “herd”

And, of course, men come in a….

[you get the rest]