Please don’t do that! It often results in names that make no sense and aren’t actually used by anyone. I don’t know why people on iNat started doing this, but it’s bad practice and seems to be spreading like a disease. If no common name is given in reliable sources, the species should not have a common name on iNaturalist.
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Ahh…
A common name is a name in common usage. If you have to invent it … then it is NOT in common usage. ‘Bitter daisy’ because if the cows eat it, the milk is bitter. Our Porterville neighbour, Swartland wheat and cattle farming - told me, as children they were responsible for keeping the cows away from that daisy, otherwise they had to drink the bitter milk. The common name had meaning and significance for them.
Blister bush is one of the first plants Cape Town hikers are taught to recognise.
Are scientists now encouraged, or expected, to offer a common name when they describe a new species ?
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As touched on by others here, names develop out of interaction. Common names thus always develop in a local, contextual fashion as befits the people’s needs in that particular place at that particular time. As such, it will be both culturally an ecologically dependent in terms of what aspects distinguish it, what else is around that it needs to be distinguished from, and potentially also the ontological / taxonomic worldview it needs to be fitted into (i.e. what class of relations it needs to be fitted to). It is a particularly “Western” perspective to assume universalism – that there is only one world, only one way of understanding it, and only one valid taxonomic classification / categorisation. And even staying within this Western paradigmatic box, it is only in the modern imperialistic age, as even more recently accelerated by the internet, that we have developed the idea of globalised / homogenised common names leading to the practical loss of the vast majority of then (and even just in the English language).
In any case, I would highly recommend this wonderful talk by Andrew Gosler. It touches on a number of interesting subjects including bird song, the relationship between bio-diversity and linguistic diversity, and also gives a great insight into the roots of many common bird names in the modern era:
Knowing and Naming: The Roots of Ethno-Ornithology | Andrew Gosler
https://youtu.be/N2HjVLLTOsc?t=194
I recommend watching it in full, but if you are only intereted in the latter subject, then you can skip forward to the section entitled: “What’s in a name?”:
https://youtu.be/N2HjVLLTOsc?t=1475
Note here how: “every village has its own name”
So in the end I would say, if it suits you to call something be a name that has some particularly useful meaning and resonance for you, then why not? If others have similar relationships such as to also find that name useful, and aesthetically enjoyable to use, perhaps they will also be happy to adopt it in time. Until then, others might struggle to understand you, but this is a common enough situation as often encountered with names particular to particular families, or just used between married couples etc. :)
I think you will not get far trying to impose new ideas directly upon other people, so I would suggest to think of it more as a personal joy for your own use. But if others show interest, you could provide it along with the scientific name for clarity, e.g.: “What I like to call X (Linnean name)”. Have fun! 
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Thanks @bsteer and everyone else! 
I will use the common name for myself. Large Spore Rooting Shank sounds like a good name.
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No.
You have invented a name for your own use. It is NOT a common name for the species.
It may become a common name eventually, but that process will likely take years or even decades. So stop thinking that you can short-circuit the process by just making something up.
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I can come up with a personal common name for anything I like. That’s nothing to do with any process, it’s just a fact that people come up with their own names for things. The process is where one person’s common name gets adopted by others until it becomes an official ‘common name’. There’s no suggestion that @rangerpuffin is going to try to force the application of that personal common name more generally.
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Indeed, there’s no problem with anyone making up their own name for a species and sharing that name with friends. Of course you should be candid about that; if you introduce someone new to the species tell them “I call these Yellow Ninja Warblers” rather than “These are called Yellow Ninja Warblers”, and don’t add it as a name on iNat, but other than that there’s nothing wrong with it.
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It might be because some field guides started doing it.
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Also the ever-problematic wildspecies.ca list of fabricated common names, which has been used as justification for the “everything needs a common name” crusaders that slap convoluted common names on everything.
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I overheard someone at a zoo once tell his kids that the animals in front of them were “fox possums”. So that’s what I always call red pandas now.
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In the topic I referred to earlier:
The taxon Heartleaf Foamflower (Tiarella cordifolia) got split in two with a new taxon called Creeping Foamflower (Tiarella stolonifera), called as such because of the root structure. Unfortunately, the split covered a large geographic range, so pre-split people who called it Heartleaf Foamflower in the affected areas would technically have to call it Creeping Foamflower to follow the split. @tiwane’s comment near the end of the topic sums up the iNat stance on situations like these.
Thanks. But I meant does a published description for a new sp include a common name.
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Yup, I’ve seen this in hoverfly groups. Someone saying “can I get ID confirmation this is a Hairy-faced Lesser Brush-striped Sedge-botherer?” and literally the country’s leading Syrphidae experts have absolutely no idea what they’re on about.
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I know at least here in North America a field guide for hover flies was published relatively recently that included common names for every species, many of them newly invented for the purpose of the guide. Some of them sound remarkably similar to your hilarious improvised name! This approach worked fairly well for dragonflies but it gets more and more impractical the further the subjects get from being charismatic megafauna. There are just too many insects/fungi with too many minute similarities for common names for every species to work well.
E.g. I talked about this before with Condylosylus flies:
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Some people just really want there to be common names for a thing even though it is something tiny or cryptic that has mostly escaped the interest of humans - up until some hyperfocused scientists with a dissecting scope and a lot of time decided to get up close and personal with fly genatalia.
People sometimes ask me for common names for mushrooms and I’m just like ‘IDK man this entire genus barely has common names’
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What are you on about? How else will a common name ever develop unless someone picks a good one, starts using it, and sees if others agree? That’s literally what a common name is.
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Common names have never made sense. Using the latin root is probably the safest bet, especially when it directly relates to a physical description of the organism. As is the case here.
Red Panda, Giraffe, Anaconda, Horse. What do any of these mean? Do these words make sense? If a person had never heard of these animals would these common names help them understand what these looked like? Not really… They are random strings of letters we invented to be common names. If a common name does not yet exist, all one must do is pitch an idea and see if it gains traction. It’s not a scientific process because it’s not s scientific name.
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that is how you see languages? ouch.
Scientific binomials are equally ‘invented random strings’ roughly based on 2 dead languages which are also spludged together. And then with bits of other living languages smidged in. We could use a QR or bar code.
PS neither Latin nor Greek, but Dutch
The genus name of Oudemansiella is in honour of Corneille Antoine Jean Abram Oudemans (1825–1906), who was a Dutch botanist and physician who specialized in fungal systematics
Common names exist because before Linnaean taxonomy was a thing, and even AFTER it was, different people, in different areas, with different cultures and languges, named the things that they saw in the world around them. Organisms that have more human uses, cultural significance, or are just stand-out and charismatic, are naturally going to develop common names - and often, multiple common names depending on region.
Species that lack these qualifiers, especially in cryptic groups like bryophytes, fungi, lichens, diptera, etc… may not have common names. And that’s okay. You can certainly start calling something a non-linnean name, but if no one knows what you’re talking about, it serves zero functionality as a common name and everyone you talk to about it will just be confused. Yes, language is made up by humans, but so are a whole heck of a lot of other things (like, hey, the entire concept of what a species is), and it’s primary purpose is to facilitate communication between people.
If your common name serves no communication function because you just made it up one day, it’s not really useful, IMHO.
All that said, I definitely know of people who have published fungi who have proposed a common name for it (in the paper) and then folks immediately started calling it by that common name - thus being adopted by the community and becoming a useful common name. There are also cases like the Audobon guides, which insist on common names and just kind of make them up where they don’t exist, and some of those names get generally accepted but some just… don’t. For example, Climacosystis borealis has the common name of ‘Climax Polypore’ in the most recent edition of Mushrooms of North America published by the Audobon society, but googling that name comes back with zero hits. Wikipedia doesn’t even call it that name. I’ve never seen anyone call it that common name. It’s not even a common enough mushroom to really HAVE a common name, it just exists in the Audobon guide because they insist that EVERYTHING needs a common name.
tl;dr go ahead and try to make some up but if no one uses them, they aren’t useful.
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