The Right of a Fly to a Common Name

Indeed! Motivation (conscious or subconscious) behind the action is often telling…

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Ok. Slight edit needed perhaps. This is disconnected to the issue which is of central importance to me on this thread. Which is not so much the existing process of name formation or the historical precedence around this - which your comment is focussed around if I understand you correctly. But rather more, human relationships with living beings and how common names might play a part in that.

For me, it makes sense that specialists in Syrphidae want to invent common names for species. I think this helps with the public awareness of Syrphidae that we need and I think its great to hear its happening in North America as well as the UK. Limiting this due to the historical precedence of humanity ignoring Syrphidae thus far seems to be a completely circular logic. Similarly though, limiting the creation of a public name to experts makes just as little sense to me… as to my mind, those with expertise may anyway not be the best arbiters of a public name. And in many locations and taxa, the experts simply don’t even exist. It would make a lot more sense to me personally if this was opened up to the public in some way, whatever shape that might take.

I get that this is against iNat policy.
I am not suggesting to anyone to break iNat policy.
I am not personally planning to break iNat policy.

It also seems abundantly clear that most other people on this thread see this issue very differently.
And I seem to be just repeating my same take on this over and over.
So, I’ll try and step out at this point.

It’s been interesting to learn more about the conventions of common names and the perspectives of everyone here in the community.
Thanks folks! :)

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I think people should be free to make up and publish whatever common names they desire in whatever ways they have available. You could make a personal blog introducing different fly species and how to identify them and what you think they should be called. Other people are free to use it as they see fit or ignore it.

I do think that a lack of common names could be a small barrier to interest for a group and that having common names will help encourage people who have a slight interest in the group. However, if people aren’t interested in the group at all then having common names probably won’t help them start being interested. People will probably get into a group for other reasons, and once enough people are interested in the group as a hobby then common names may start forming naturally through these processes.

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Elsewhere in this thread you’ve mentioned ‘marginalized’ species and the idea of using names as a form of community outreach so I’m very surprised to read that you didn’t use that situation as a teaching opportunity. No one is going to get better at recognizing the value of Tachinids or learn about their common names (should they exist) if the person they encounter who appears knowledgeable about them is hiding that information by calling them something entirely different. ;)

As someone who is conspicuously foreign in my area I often have people come up to see what it is that I’m photographing and I approach those situations as an opportunity to share something about whatever it is that I’m photographing – from spiders to earwigs to flies. Rather than shift the focus to something more charismatic I prefer to encourage interest in species based on their own merit. Sometimes my audience loses interest and quickly wanders away but other times I end up with experiences like the man who listened to me talk about bagworm moths and then excitedly went back to his wife to share what he’d learned with her.

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Sure. I have done in the past. And perhaps in this instance I could indeed have been more active in that regard. I just think its helpful when there are common language names to help facilitate this.

Like @bouteloua, I also make up names sometimes or describe creatures using common language terms, but this person couldn’t then go home and google it to find out more, if it isn’t a stored name. A recent time when I was photographing bee-flies for example I mentioned this term to a curious enquirer. When I met her again, she said she had looked them up and had been out looking for them herself since.

Its also not so easy to term in good common language off the top of your head sometimes. My first thought might have been parasitic flies for example for Tachinidae which could be off-putting. I’m glad @upupa-epops made the suggestion of bristle flies … which I can use from now on.

I also don’t actually know how to pronounce most scientific names myself correctly, including Tachinidae. ( ae is “ee” I recently read (?) ) .

I also think use of Latin is innately exclusive to the general public.
For me it has strong connotations of elitism and class in the UK.

Well, now for some reason I have the scene of the schoolmaster-like Roman guard correcting the grammar in the graffiti from Life of Brian in my head.

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Great film! Maybe relates in a way - its very connected to schooling here, as Latin is pretty exclusive to private schools in UK these days.

Interesting to see how Latin is compulsory in a fair few places still across Europe though. Didn´t realise that.https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Instruction_in_Latin#:~:text=After%20the%20introduction%20of%20the,%2C%20OCR%2C%20SQA%20and%20WJEC.

Perhaps the connotation of class division and elitism for me may be unique to my UK background then I guess (?) …At least it´s the only country mentioned on the Wikipedia article where it notes a private school connection.

Yes, in the US it is also not a core requirement. I believe it may be considered part of a classical education at “boarding schools”, though.

That’s probably why my brain went from your comment to expensive schools to that scene.

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I fear that this would just invite endless variations of Boaty McBoatface and the like.

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That would be the other extreme, yes.
There are also middle grounds though…

E.g.

Single expert
Group of experts
Democratically elected committee
Experts in collaboration with poets
Democratically elected committee with input of group of poets
Single expert voting on names suggested by general public
Group of experts voting on names suggested by general public
Committee voting on names suggested by general public
Public voting on names created by committee of experts
Public voting on names created by poets
Public voting on names public creates (e.g. Boaty McBoatface )
Randomised selection from list of names created by public

etc
etc
…and everything else inbetween…

Bold = formats I’ve come across which already exist for the artificial invention of “common” names.

wildebeest (it has Dutch and Afrikaans roots)

In South Africa in the Western Cape, we have many plants called Cape whatever - and OURS has no taxonomic link to that ‘plant in the home country’.
But then the Cape gooseberry is a cape like Superman and comes from Peru.
.

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That’s very fair, but when you have a group with say 40-50 species, all rather similar and from a “non-charismatic” group, that’s when I feel the names become a bit redundant. I wasn’t meaning to discount cases involving unique or interesting organisms where the common names is useful for encouraging public awareness or just general interest.

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But ladybug common names are extremely useful, yes, you have to search through them first, seeing the variation, but then it saves time a lot to type in a common name other than lerning which genus this particular ladybug belongs to.

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Of course - they are no different from any other names in that regard. But as I said previously, it all depends on how the names are used, rather than on what the names are.

If you already know that the observation is of Subcoccinella vigintiquatuorpunctata, it’s nice to have “24” as a shortcut to save typing. However, it’s not so nice that less knowledgeable users think that any ladybird that appears to have 24 spots is Subcoccinella vigintiquatuorpunctata.

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Regardless though - isn’t a more community-centred process like this at least closer to the actual formation of common names than putting it solely in the hand of a single expert?

Boaty McBoatface to me just sounds like the submarine equivalent of Mountain Chicken and Lumpy Horse.

Common names maintain currency where there’s a practical need for them. If the names aren’t being used, they quickly fall out of use. That’s just normal language evolution. It seems to me that communities of professionals and other dedicated enthusiasts are most likely to regularly use these names, so they should have the largest say in coining them. There’s nothing wrong with occasionally opening up the process as a public relations excercise - even if it produces wilfuly silly names like Boaty McBoatFace. However, I feel it would be a mistake to allow that to become the norm. For one thing, it would surely risk alienating the people who dedcate much of their lives to the study of often very obscure groups of organisms (and usually with very little material reward or recognition).

People can make up and use whatever daft informal names they please without fear of any unwanted consequences. Creating canonical common names for use by the scientific community is a very different proposition.

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Young kids deal with names like Tyrannosaurus, Triceratops, Pterosaur, and others that I can’t spell. People of all ages can deal with scientific names if they’re interested in distinguishing the species, and if they’re not, English or Spanish or Lithuanian names* are unlikely to help. If you want to make up common names, go for it (there’s no rule against it) but dealing with one set of names is enough of a challenge for my memory.

  • I was going to write, “common names” but if we have to make them up, they aren’t common.
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Most of those are at least commonly used names in English though. In the case of Hawaii, the Hawaiian names are the only ones used in English as well, and these weird names only seem to be used in the horticulture trade or in lists like in iNat.

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The strange complication of this is that many international tourists visiting Aotearoa NZ, and I imagine much the same in Hawaii, go around looking for Australasian swamphens, blue wattled crows and parson birds rather than pūkeko, kōkako and tūī. There may be these English names, but they aren’t actually used by locals and by the use of English names it has complicated communication rather than clarifying anything. It seems the assumption made is that the English name is the common/legitimate one even where it is not.

The middle ground we’ve met for many of the native birds is to also put their commonly used name in te reo Mа̄ori as an English name (as when speaking English you still do use their original names) and setting them as the default name, at least for some of those where the English name isn’t commonly used like the above examples. Still, many birds that the English name simply isn’t used often still have it as the default- pūkeko (at least at species level), tawaki, hoiho, etc.

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That’s just it, there actually aren’t any like that. There are a handful of birds, such as the Maui parrotbill and crested honeycreeper, where there was no Hawaiian name (there may have been at some point but it was lost before being recorded), and people have been pushing to use recently coined Hawaiian names instead, but that’s kind of different. With the plants, nobody shows up looking for the hillside false ohelo or the forest wild coffee. These names simply aren’t in real use anywhere, they’re just coined by somebody far away who has never actually seen it in the wild and maybe not at all.

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