Very true. Well said.
Some species have dozen of common names, not only in English but in other language as well. Way back, I had a litterature review to do on Vaccinium vitis-idaea, which has over 20 common names in English only and its fair share in French as well. The only way for me to know for sure the Finns, the Newfounlanders, the Quebecers, the Acadians etc… were studying the same plants was the latin name. On the other hand, vernacular names are important when you talk to local non scientific people about the plants. The best info you get is from gardeners, farmers, loggers, hunters etc. so vernacular names are important as well, but in the context you do your field work. It is easier to not be offended than changing how locals have called an organism for generations.
No, there’re clearly rude and offensive names, each plant has many names, so no problem in using one and not the other.
My dad used to tell me this as a kid. “You’re only insulted if you choose to be insulted.”
I’m neutral on the situation, I don’t care either way, I mostly go by scientific names anyway when it comes to organisms beyond vertebrae’s.
Edited by request
In South Africa the k-word (not sure if that can mean anything to anyone on either side of the great pond?) is as offensive as the n-word in the USA.
This was once known as kaffirboom.
Now it is coral tree. The binomial remains.
http://pza.sanbi.org/erythrina-caffra
Sociology versus botany back in 1991
I think names that could cause offence by referencing a nationality, but are widely used (such as indian paintbrush, mexican hat)should stay, as many people will be confused if they don’t come up on a search, but actual slurs in the name are different, what is even the point of a common name if it is too offensive to actually use?
I have opinions, fairly strong on this issue. But it is much easier to say, I’m glad to be 68 years old and to not have to worry about it in 50 years from now. Recent US politics show there is no easy solution to offending someone; I’m not condoning anyone’s actions. It is like my professor, Dr. Edwin B. Smith said, “I’m going to use Compositae until I die. Someone else can call it Asteraceae if they like.” Some plants will always be in the genus Aster or Eupatorium for me. It is just too complex to learn the new names. I’d get rid of some offensive names and keep others. However, it is like we said in the Regional Office of the US Forest Service. “The higher you go in the organization, the more you realize ‘I’m not in charge of everything.’” So, for me, I will let others sort this out!
Words that may be offensive in some cultures or situations may not be in others.Trying to impose the “dominant” or “superior” view of what is offensive and what is not onto other people is in itself offensive. Dismissing the concerns of certain cultures or groups of people as to what is offensive, while upholding and encouraging the concerns of other groups of people (without a legitimate basis) is just wrong. That is why the key factor in this issue should be intent, and NOT simply whether some people have decided to take offense to something.
Problem with common names is that they are not standardized and quite a few species have several common names varying geographically. So my Diver is your Loon, or vice versa for example. Use common names but also append the scientific name is best practice.
One of my students was given a cutting of her grandmother’s ‘wandering jew’ plant. I can’t remember if she misheard the name or just creatively changed it, but she was very proud to show me a picture of her ‘wandering dude’.
@Sedgehead – I’m kind of with you on this. One can really get lost down the rabbit hole on this discussion, or the other thread regarding images that include the “OK” symbol, or even the one on the common name of the common flesh fly (!). Life is full of situations where the solutions are unsatisfactory to some or many or perhaps everyone. But as controversies go, these are tempests in teapots.
Very true!
The hard part for me is when I use a great local plant book, many species have many common names, and it seems like most of the time, the common name is different on iNaturalist.
So, it throws me off, and I wish I could customize the common name displayed to my liking.
Plants too. Pinus sabiniana (Gray Pine/ Foothills Pine) used to be known a “Digger Pine”, which was a racial slur toward some of the Native People of California. That name has now been retired.
Out of curiosity where is the racism in Digger pine? Did natives dig? or umm i just can’t see a correlation then again i don’t know anything of the natives of California.
It’s a slur towards groups referred to derogatively as ‘Digger Indians’ (dug for tubers, etc for food)
As @thebeachcomber said.
If you’re interested, the following is a pretty good opinion piece about inherent racism in certain common botanical names (it may have already been posted earlier):
I don’t know why I didn’t think to mention this earlier, but something important to keep in mind in all of this is the etymological fallacy. The etymological fallacy is essentially the failure to acknowledge the fact that language is perpetually changing, and the meanings of words are often drastically different from what they were originally (or at some point in time). It is the argument that because X word originally started out with Y meaning, that it currently still has that meaning. Once you know about it, you’ll see that this fallacy is committed ALL. THE. TIME. One example many people might be familiar with is the term “decimate”. In current usage, the word means that something was almost completely destroyed or hurt, but it started out with the practice of killing one in ten (hence the prefix- “deci”) soldiers as a form of punishment. Some people argue that using that term to talk about almost complete destruction is wrong, because it should refer to only destroying 10% of something. That’s the etymological fallacy.
The fact is that if you dig into linguistics, a surprisingly large number of words have origins that might be considered offensive. The word “lady”, for example, originally comes from a word related to kneading (as in kneading dough, a reference to the fact that the place of women used to be in the kitchen doing household tasks). This emphasizes the fact that we need to be careful and not pretend that words themselves have meanings- they only have the meanings we assign to them. We need to understand that even words (such as common names) that started out with offensive connotations, or use offensive words, may have changed their meaning to be completely inoffensive in the contexts that they are currently used in.
It could even be argued that the very act of assigning a non-offensive meaning to an “offensive word” (such as assigning it to mean a particular organism) by definition then makes it not offensive in that context, unless the organism itself is somehow offensive. After all, we regularly use words that in some contexts can be highly offensive slurs against particular groups of people (for example yellow, fairy, frog, pig/swine, and about ten billion others, lol), and we acknowledge the fact that they’re not offensive because words can have multiple meanings- including BOTH offensive and inoffensive ones. Well, while a particular word might be offensive in general usage, the very fact that it is used in a name to which we have a separate inoffensive meaning therefore means that the “offensive common name” is, by definition, therefore not offensive.
I originally started that last paragraph with the intention of saying that I wasn’t actually going to advocate for that view, but I sort of convinced myself, lol… Still not entirely, because I think there is some nuance there left to explore, but I think that argument is actually mostly correct. It might be a bit too black-or-white(?), but I think it’s worth keeping in mind.
I would like that, too. Not only would we be able to use the common names that are actually used in our area without someone randomly changing the common names to names no one uses in the area, but the necessity of getting into discussions where people are telling other people what they should think would be reduced. And I mean seeing only your preferred common names–no one else could see what you’re using. Now that I’m thinking more about it, why is a global site even trying to decide what local common names are, let alone what they should be?