Same here! Unforgivable.
You may be surprised to to know how long it’s been since cursive has been lost. I, born in 91, did learn cursive but lost it and my brother, born in 96, didn’t learn it at all (note people born in 2001 can buy a beer now). I can read cursive but my speed is similar to my speed reading Greek or Cyrillic cause I’ve forgotten some of the letters! At any rate that means there are full grown adults out here essentially living post cursive writing.
But I came here to say some people do write in all caps! They are engineers of generations past. As an engineer myself I know that all my coworkers over a certain age used to have to write in all caps and some still do. Writing in lower case is what they complain about as a lost art!
I surely expect to dread the next generations new writing form in the coming decades. My guess is punctuation rules will drop away and grammar rule will greatly simplify. I fear the generation ahead of me already doesn’t know when to use semi-colon and colons and many common mistakes like there/their and its/it’s will change their meaning.
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I struggle to read clocks/watches with hands. The numbers look a jumble, I can never remember which direction past that the hand coresponds to, and if the big or little arm is read first or second. Neurodiversity is a thing. And my IQ is def not an issue xD I just can’t tell clockwise vs counter clockwise, I can tell it is different but cannot remember which is which, ever. I can read those backwards clocks (that are mirror imaged) the same as I can standard, for example. I can also read mirrored text the same speed and ease as regular forward text. yeah they are different, but they present the same and my brain can follow each equally…its hard to explain.
Again, neurodiveristy. Some people it is faster to read because it is easier, letters look a lot more unique in cursive. Many others (like yourself) find it more difficult.
This thread seems full of people making assumptions about how easy/hard things are off of their own perspective…people who struggle aren’t dumb or not trying or whatever, brains work differently and so some things will work for some and not others.
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I have a long, deep and abiding dislike of common names.
In fungi there are two species with the same common name, Pig’s ears. Gyromitra ancilis and Gomphus clavatus, one an ascomycete and the other a basidiomycete.
Many species have multiple common names due in part to different localities having developed different names over time.
In the Audubon Field Guide to North American Mushrooms the author, Gary Lincoff was required to create common names for all mushrooms in the book that did not have one (or more) already (personal communication).
The scientific name refers to one species not multiple. I am well aware of synonymies while species placement in the phylogenetic tree gets worked out. There is a code for that.
Common names may be created by anyone for any reason and if it sticks…
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Nothing of what you described make them less valuable, using historical names that were created centuries ago is saving that history.
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@rayray and @henryy1355, I agree that one common name can identify multiple different taxons, which is a big problem when describing something accurately.
Given your dislike of common names, for cases where a short, common name is arguably easier to remember. For example only 1-2 syllables vs 6-8 for scientific name:
- Do you forgo the ease of remembering it by the common names?
- Has familiarity with Greek/Latin/etc. roots made it easier over time?
- Something else?
Or maybe I’m misunderstanding and it’s more that you don’t like only common names, without a scientific name too?
Short common names with long scientific names:
Just to be clear, the ‘clock test’ is used for dementia, not IQ. If you ask questions of an elderly ‘confused’ person, they often become agitated if they cannot remember things like the month or season. Most will attempt a clock, and it offers clues whether more testing may be needed. Clearly, you can articulate complicated ideas, so there is no need to assess your cognitive status!
And, such tests are blunt instruments, one part of an overall functional assessment. If you have ever worked with demented people, you will know neudiversity is not the same thing.
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But it is going from … John Smith … both capitalised, so plants and animals are the same, right?
Once it is published - book - newspaper - the editor should know better. Should
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Not particular. When it is in the comments section of an observation it is pretty obvious what one is referring to.
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In my previous life I used to be the person responsible to make sure that the bibliography was formatted consistently, that scientific names were italicized properly, that punctuation was consistent… (That has inter alia led to me developing a profound dislike for the US-American habit of including punctuation within quotes even though said punctuation logically belongs to the sentence the quote is embedded in).
I enclose scientific names in asterisks (*Genus species*) everywhere, even in informal emails, even if the editor is set to plain text.
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When my mom went to school, she learned to write in Sütterlin. My grandmother’s letters always looked so wonderfully orderly. By the time I went to school, Sütterlin was relegated to one hour a week, during the ‘calligraphy lesson’, which incidentally was not only about Sütterlin. Fast forward 40 years later, when Sütterlin and Fraktur have completely disappeared from the syllabus and kids in schools no longer get marks for calligraphy (nice writing), I still get the occasional call from the museum when they have some 19th century handwritten note that nobody can decipher.
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I prefer scientfic names because I normally deal with three languages, and for the life of me I can’t remember three (and often more than three!) common names for one and the same species. Every time I see names that may be obvious to you, like ‘warbler’ or ‘kale’, I have to look them up first.
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Yay, someone else! I generally refuse to follow that rule even if it is the main American style.
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I definitely see your point, and to it does make sense for your examples.
But for me, with something like the many Blechnum s lat. ferns here in southeast Australia, Oceaniopteris cartilaginea (gristle fern) Doodia aspera (prickly rasp fern) and many others – the common names are a bit contrived, and don’t really have historical value either, being max ~200 years old. They’re stored right at the back of my brain, despite some latin/greek names being long and unwieldy, they also keep changing, so that leaves less pace for the common ones.
First Nation/ indigenous names would be better, but very few are used.
I do use bracken instead of Pteridium esculentum and common names for animals are also good imho.
So I does make a big difference both where you are, and in what group ones interest lies.
PS I’ve never used anything other than common names in the vegetable isle in the supermarket, tempting as it is to ask to staff if they have some nice Solanum tuberosum or Musa × paradisiaca .
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Also the examples I used above have common names with a capital on each word…
Edit: I was referring to Oceaniopteris cartilaginea (gristle fern) Doodia aspera (prickly rasp fern), in fact the common names of most ferns on iNat, here seem to have caps on all words.
There exists an argument for SpongeBob SquarePants (Aplysina fistularis) too? I never watched the show and assumed Spongebob was a synthetic kitchen dish sponge because of the shape.
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Right now I am having a discussion on Facebook about a photo of Hypericum calycinum. It’s a St. John’s Wort – that name can be used for the whole genus, or for the species Hypericum perforatum. The common name used on iNaturalist (and in some other places) for H. calycinum is Rose of Sharon. That name is also used for the very different Hibiscus syriaca, another Hibiscus species, and some other taxa. So the person is arguing that the photo doesn’t depict Rose of Sharon. In some sense she’s right (It’s not a Hibiscus!) but in another sense she’s wrong. It would be so much easier if we were just using scientific names.
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I agree, I know someone who argued that mountain ash (Eucalyptus regnans) and European ash (Fraxinus excelsior) would share the same die back, and diseases :)
“They’re both species of ash”!
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I agree. Some of the common names say more about the name-giving culture than the species. I presume the idea of likening the Eucalyptus regnans to an ash came from European settlers – it reminded them of a tree they knew.
A friend of mine – endowed with two very impressive green thumbs :-) – explained to me that in order to strike up a conversation with people who had interesting seeds or cuttings, it turned out that using scientific names was a show stopper. Her plant sharing rate went up sharply after she dropped any reference to scientific names. She comes across more down-to-earth, apparently, less posh or haughty, than when she refers to plants by their scientific names.
Not far from my place is a patch of trees that belongs to a farmer from another village. Once a year in spring they show up to cut firewood. This year I saw pieces of one particular tree, already stripped of its branches, on their trailer and asked what tree that was. No idea about its common name, let alone genus+species. The middle-aged son asked his father (>80 years old) what it was, but he only knew what they called it in the local vernacular. To date I have been unable to figure out what kind of tree that was. The problem is compounded by the fact that dialects change quite impressively over a relatively short distance, and terms for one and same object vary dramatically from one place to the next.
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and, you’re not IN Sharon …
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