Sounds like a bad haircut from the '70s, but it’s actually a rather attractive bird.
In British English “shag” has an entirely different meaning…
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Chelidonium majus var. asiaticum has the common name 애기똥풀 in Korean.
The English translation is “baby poop grass”.
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There is an entire group called Cinquefoil. I think the person who named these was a French language dropout since cinqfeuille would really mean “five leaves”.
Oh, poor grass, in Russian it’a an asian bodayclean(er), btw it’s a whole species on iNat.
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The name was calqued from Old French into Norman French by the English. That is, the French called the plants “quintefeuille” since the 11th century, and the English just translated that literally into Norman French words that had been borrowed into Middle English, and have since fallen out of use in favour of the words “five” and “leaf” from Old English. Middle English was heavily influenced by the Norman French speakers responsible for the conquest of 1066, so much so that they had two words for many common things, one from Old English and the other from Norman French.
Norman French was the language of what were, essentially, Vikings who settled down after conquering part of France. They mostly adopted the French language, but kept some words from Old Norse, had some differences in pronunciation, and conserved some Old French words which were lost or changed in Middle French. All this was before the printing press was invented and helped standardize spelling everywhere, so the literate Norman French had their own way of spelling a lot of words.
In short, whoever named cinquefoil was probably highly educated, in a time when there were major regional differences in language dialects, and translated the name into the more familiar local rulers’ dialect.
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I thought I would be excited by this genus, but in the end learning about it was a disappointment.
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Tokyo, be very afraid, and it has children too.
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Huh, I would have expected that to be a reptile genus.
And none of the children are named Godzuki! 
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Gojirasaurus is a genus of dinosaur, but unfortunately it’s probably not valid.
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A South African birder friend (are you there, Chris?) has a thing he does when he visits a new place where he picks one of his target birds based on its name. I’ve borrowed his idea a few times. I think the first one I set as an objective was Wandering Tattler (got it). I’m still working on Northern Beardless Tyrannulet.
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Clicked the link - the actual organism surprised me even more than the name!
How does your inner 12 year old feel about this ?
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Aren’t they just gorgeous! :D
Dropping back into this thread to point out the Horrible Spiny Lizard, Sceloporus horridus. I’m all but certain it has a more reasonable explanation for its name, because it actually is pretty spiky overall, but I can’t help but imagine its description going like this:
Scientist: Okay, so we have here a Sceloporus lizard that’s especially spiky, so how about the Rough Spiny Lizard Sceloporus spiniferus?
Lizard: proceeds to bite the scientist
Scientist: ohoho I have a better idea now
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If the same reasoning applies to Ursus arctos horribilis, I’d rather have the lizard bite me anyday!
Update: Turns out it does apply. George Ord originally named the grizzly bear Ursus horribilius after Meriweather Lewis’s (the Lewis in Lewis and Clark) description of an unfortunate personal encounter with one. It was since updated to U. arctos horribilus by Alexander Theodor von Middendorf.
The Xingu Scale-backed Antbird’s name is rather funny. Found it on eBird after clicking the ‘Surprise Me’ button a lot of times. 
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More than 170 posts, and not one mention of Lalapa lusa . Unfortunately no iNat sightings yet: https://www.inaturalist.org/observations?taxon_id=1119072
It is on BugGuide, though: https://bugguide.net/node/view/893586
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