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 SCIENTIFIC NAMES VERSUS COMMON NAMES

The purpose of naming organisms is to provide a means of reference to facilitate communication about those organisms. A universally understood, precise, and stable system of naming is essential for effective scientific communication. A simple system of naming is also desirable, but simplicity and precision are unfortunately not always compatible.

Humans around the world have been naming plants, and probably fungi and algae too, for millennia. A culture that utilizes these organisms for food, medicine, wood, fibre, mind alteration, etc., needs a means of referring to particular organisms, and common names (also called vernacular names) probably exist in every language.

Many of these common names refer to some physical aspect of the plant. The name bluebell derives from blue, bell-shaped flowers. The name cuckoo pint derives not from the bird and a unit of capacity, but from Old English cuic and pintel, meaning “lively” (quick) and “penis”, respectively, referring to the erect, cylindric, fleshy appendix of the inflorescence. Sometimes plant uses are the basis of the name, e.g. medicine in self-heal and woundwort; parasite-control in fleabane; bedding material in bedstraw. Frequently folk taxonomy is also implicit in the name, and this may coincide with a modern scientific classification of a group, e.g. trees and shrubs named as various kinds of oak or Eiche in English and German, respectively, are scientifically named Quercus, thus durmast oak or Traubeneiche is Q. petraea; holm oak or Steineiche is Q. ilex; white oak or Flaumeiche is Q. pubescens (in Europe, whereas the North American white oak is Q. alba). However, the name oak can be used for phylogenetically quite unrelated plants, e.g. poison oak in western North America is Toxicodendron diversilobum, which is not closely related to Quercus. Similarly, white bryony and black bryony in Britain are, respectively, Bryonia cretica and Dioscorea communis (or Tamus communis); both are climbing, non-woody vines, but again they are not at all closely related.

There is, however, a problem with common names: while they may provide a popular “handle” for discussing organisms, they are frequently ambiguous, often with multiple names in common use for the same organism, and with several examples of the same name, in one or more languages, applied to different organisms in different geographical regions. In Britain, the name cuckoo-flower has been applied to seventeen species in ten families (Watts, 2000). One of those species probably has more British common names than any other plant, including lords-and-ladies, parson-in-the-pulpit, cuckoo-pint, and some names used only regionally, e.g. ram’s-horn (Sussex) and adder’s-tongue (Cornwall and Somerset). The name bluebell is applied to three quite different species in England, Scotland, and North America, and the Scottish bluebell is the harebell in England. 10