Interpretation of rule against invented common names

[jasonhernandez74]

@lothlin

It’s just a weird case where the common name is way more stable than the scientific name

Actually, it’s not a wierd case at all. In fact, the same thing ws said earlier in the thread:

@vreinkymov

I hope someone has a better example, but scientific names aren’t guaranteed to be long-lasting and often change, so knowing the common name for something can better communicates what the thing is than an ever-changing scientific name.

For example, this Blue Elderberry can currently be identified as:

…and there were four binomials for the same taxon. And this has come up in other threads before:

@jnstuart

Such workers, however, might do well to read the following paragraph quoted from George Wald
(Biochemical Evolution, in Trends in Physiology and Biochemistry, Edited
by E. S. Guzman Barron, Academic Press, N. Y., 1952:337–376).
“In the original version of this table, Nuttall mentions Cynocephalus
mormon and sphinx, omitting their common names. I have learned since
that one is the mandrill and the other the guinea baboon. Since Nuttall wrote in 1904, these names have undergone the following vagaries: Cynocephalus mormon became Papio mormon, otherwise Papio maimon, which turned to Papio sphinx. This might well have been confused with
Cynocephalus, now become Papio sphinx, had not the latter meanwhile
been turned into Papio papio. This danger averted, Papio sphinx now
became Mandrillus sphinx, while Papio papio became Papio comatus. All
I can say to this is, thank heavens one is called the mandrill and the other
the guinea baboon.

Yet every time this old argument comes back, the scientific-names-only crowd never address this problem. Maybe they don’t see it as a problem, but from the standpoint of being able to communicate, it certainly is. Imagine if Merriam-Webster had as many changes as taxomony does. How much cross-referencing of changed word meanings would you have to do to understand an article written ten or twenty years ago?

@zoology123

I’m not sure I know any common name for any non avian dinosaur species. Pretty much every single one I know are latin.

Elosaurus is one of my favorites