Yeah, the common names don’t catch up fast. I see many Hypena as “Bomolochas” in field guides.
Having never formally studied botany or zoology I was not aware of the italicization convention. I struggle already getting the spellings correct, even for species I identify regularly the endings always seem to have an unexpected twist for me. However, I do identification of one genus around the world, and the common names vary even among English speaking countries, so I make it a habit to use the botanical names.
I must admit that even knowing the convention, I do not intend to italicize. I am trying to get through a huge backlog from past years, while going through up to 300 new entries each day looking for errors so egregious that I can spot them (and leaving the rest of the identifications to others), so I am not going to slow down to do mark up.
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In the genus I often identify the common name in England is different than the US common name and nothing like the translation of the Russian common name. And there are areas in England and the US that also have very local nick names. Like it or not, I need to use the scientific name on identifications.
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Not sure if you already use the 3-letter shorcut for genus species spelling. If not, it might help with the backlog. You don’t need to type out the entire genus and part of species, often just remembering the first 3 of each is enough to bring up the right taxon.
For example:
- White Mullein (Verbascum lychnitis) - type “ver lyc” to find quickly it in taxa or for IDs
- Dense-flowered Mullein (Verbascum densiflorum) - type “ver den” to find quickly in taxa or for IDs
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I had no idea. Thank you!
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Any number of letters work! For your second example, ‘d f mull’ works too. Sometimes you get lucky with two letter shortcuts like ‘er na’ for Ericameria nauseosa.
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Type slowly, so you notice at what letter iNat agrees - yes, I know that!
Works for both binomials and common names (in any language that has already been added to the list for that taxon) You can use the Russian that you are familiar with, and let iNat do the grunt work of finding the binomial for you.
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Ive been lucky to not run into much of that in my invertebrate world. Its not always just elitist/classist it can also be ablest. Language is very difficult for many Neurodiverse people for many reasons.
I cant seem to multiquote on mobile; but there was someone who said basically “why not just learn scientific name when learning names, why need common name at all its no different its just learning a name so why not learn most accurate one only” that type of thinking is definitely abilist because it assumes that even if the scientific name is written in the same characters as the persons native language, that it is equally easy to learn a new character order and pronounciation of words. I am english native speaker and so have benefit of same alphabet, but scientific names are really fking hard because the character order. It is learning a different language and not being familiar with character order means far more chance to mess it up horribly. Most scientific names look like a jumble mess of letters to me - and I came up in science with degrees and everything.
Memory tricks help, we all develop our own coping strategies after all; but i will for sure use common name if there is one because they make far more sense and are more likely to be accurate than someone trying to decypher my attempt at spelling a scientific name and getting the correct thing.
Heck; for example, it was about two years before I stopped writing down “striped cricket” and “unstriped cricket” in my field surveys - PI knew from that easily which was which. I could pronounce each after a few trips (striped sound like the start with an “s”, nonstriped “used to had ‘em” as sounds like start with Had) but was far from being able to spell them. in my own field notes, i eventually for brave and tried spelling pseuphopholous and hadienoquos because thats how latin seems to like those sounds spelled. Maybe youd be able to figure out that is Ceuthophilus (which i did just look up, after years I remember it starts Ceu and google it every time) and Hadenoecus (which I also just googled to spell correctly)
And keep in mind, being hard of hearing means I often learn pronunciation wrong. Try lip reading a forign language and tell me how that goes for you. (Tounge in cheek, but not…)
Scientific names are simply not natural to many people - even scientists - for many reasons. They are important for clarity across cultures and in final records and papers and all that - but honestly theyre extranious and extra difficult in many situations.
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Binomials are impossible for all of us to spell, because they blend Latin and Greek and then the many languages for the botanist’s names. It is ivory tower elitism.
We were stumbling over
https://www.inaturalist.org/taxa/119499-Zaluzianskya
a Czech botanist from Prague.
Inca lilies https://www.inaturalist.org/taxa/81938-Alstroemeria
he was Swedish …
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I have a lot of trouble remembering the spelling of the current name for Winterfat genus which is a common plant in my area and was named for a Russian:
Krascheninnikovia
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That’s because latinisation makes one letter into three.
Кращенинниковия
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Krascheninnikovia - Крашенинниковия (Stepan_Krasheninnikov). Щ = schts or szcz or scz (Scilla mischtschenkoana - пролеска Мищенко, Darevskia szczerbaki - скальная ящерица Щербака, Tulipa ivasczenkoae - тюльпан Иващенко) :)
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I saw it being written that way too, though in regular language, not latin names, this just shows one letter can be written as 4 or 5!
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Apologies for the delay in responding.
I do use common names for groceries and such. Wolf, coyote, turtle, daisy and many more are in my vocabulary. Even in fungi, my field of study I’ll say black trumpet rather than Craterellus calicornucopioides.
That said I tend to use scientific names most of the time. Familiarity with roots does help except when the name is an honorific.
I guess I don’t understand the perceived need to invent a common name when there is none or searching the scientific name and seeing multiple common names.
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There was a kids’ book I remember, when one of the characters was told to leave for school at quarter past. Since a quarter (dollar) is 25 cents, she waited until 25 past and got to school late – but insisted that she had left at quarter past.
I actually do use cursive if I am writing in paragraphs because it is faster than writing in print. (That’s why it was invented!) Lifting the pen between each letter adds more time than you realize. I also like that I can wait until I finish writing the word, then dot the i’s and cross the t’s all at once. Of course, sometimes I do mistakenly cross the l’s (ells), but still, overall, I find cursive easier than printing if I am writing more than a single line.
My Grinnell journal is all in cursive except for page headers and scientific names.
Somewhere, right this very minute, there is a Chinese person complaining about the loss of ideographs as pinyin takes over.
Well, let’s see… Lactuca sativa is pretty straighforward… but then you’d have to know all the ingredients in the croutons, the ingredients in the vinaigrette – Olea europaea oil, I suppose, and Vitis vinifera for the balsamic part… then, do you actually ID the cheese as Bos taurus because that is the organism that secreted the main component?
Million bells makes me think of lots and lots of bell-shaped flowers. Callibrachoa… well, if I look it up, I find a reference to some fellow by the name of Cal y Bracho, but I can’t really put a face to the name.
These conversations always do. But yes, let us get back to italics. I referenced my Grinnell journal earlier – the way I remember learning how to do one, cursive is for most of the narrative; common names are also in cursive with a wavy underline; Linnean binomials are in print with a straight underline; and broader taxonomic units such as orders and families are in print, not underlined. This system allows readers to pick out and sort organism names easily by type.
I find this notation makes sense in the same way that the precise notation we learned for writing an outline or diagramming a sentence makes sense: every jot and tittle means something. So, bringing this back around to the thread title: the reason scientific names are in italics is so that you can easily spot them and distinguish them from the rest of the words in the remark or comment. This may seem less crucial in short-form communications like iNaturalist; but if I need to scan a 100-page paper for the couple of paragraphs about the taxon I am researching, it sure is nice if I can read just the italics until I find the name I’m looking for.
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More on italics: I recall a paper many years ago that proposed an alternative system for dealing with parthenogenetic hybrid species in the lizard genus Aspidoscelis. The argument was that these unisexual lineages were not good species and shouldn’t be treated as such taxonomically, so the work-around solution was to write the specific name in quotes (no italics) to show they were something different, e.g. Aspidoscelis “neomexicanus” while still recognizing the nomenclatural history. That never caught on. I occasionally see similar approaches when referring to some species groups, such as “Americana-group” or “Caurina-group” (or something like that) when referring to American Marten (Martes americana) although these two “groups” are nowadays considered separate species. So the deliberate omission of italics can sometimes have its own meaning for special cases.
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I use scientific names for plants because they’re what I need to use for my work. They’re how I communicate with other botanists. They have great advantages in that they are precise and international. (I am so grateful to see scientific name on specimen labels otherwise in Cyrillic script or Mandarin – though I feel sorry for the collectors who had to master them in another script.)
Common names are slippery. Wild Carrot and Queen-Anne’s Lace are both Daucus carota for example, but some people have used Queen-Anne’s Lace for Cicuta maculata which is more often called Water Hemlock, and that sets up a potentially lethal miscommunication. Also, many plants don’t really have common names. For example, of the 165 Carex sedges in my area, only two or three have “real” names in English; all the rest were made up by scientists writing floras, etc. So I teach scientific names and urge my students to learn them. I’ll go so far as to recommend them to you! But you can look them up if you really need to know.
For birds, I use common names. They’re the ones I learned and they’re standardized, at least within North America. Ditto for the few butterflies I still remember. I often do find common names easier to remember for groups I’m learning, like spiders, but sometimes the scientific names stick in my mind better.
One problem with using common names in print is that they aren’t consistently capitalized, leading to miscommunication. For example, not all green frogs are Green Frogs (Lithobates clamitans), and for that matter not all Green Frogs are green.
So anyway, I use scientific names when I can because they are potentially clear and sometimes they’re the only ones I know. I can be frustrated when talking to people who use common names I don’t know, as I suspect many people are frustrated when I use the scientific names that they don’t know, but these are translation problems we can overcome.
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That’s the very example I always use when I’m trying to convince someone that capitalizing common names actually has a purpose.
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That’s why they shouldn’t have capital letters; they’re not proper nouns just like turtle is not a proper noun (and therefore not written Turtle). It’s easy to be consistent but it seems that there’s different perspectives/conventions between botany, zoology, etc and maybe even country
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That’s a very similar example I always use when I’m trying to convince someone of the exact opposite :)
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