The Naming of the Shrew

Many Latin names are as descriptive as these two, but some are particularly evocative. What better name for the venomous puff adder could there be than Bitis arietans (‘striking, biting thing’) – other than perhaps Lachesis muta, which belongs to the South American bushmaster and means ‘silent fate’? The Canadian porcupine goes by the perfect name of Erethizon dorsatum – ‘having an irritating back’. However, as this book will reveal at length, many scientific names are as useless as Troglodytes troglodytes troglodytes (‘hole burrower hole burrower hole burrower’, the burdensome name of the northern wren) and Puffinus puffinus, which is, of course, the name of the Manx shearwater.

Although similar constructions are familiar in English – ‘black duck’ and ‘wood sorrel’, for example, where ‘duck’ and ‘sorrel’ can be viewed roughly as genera – endless problems would occur in any attempt to formalise them in a taxonomy. Wood sorrel and common sorrel are only very distantly related, while the black duck is in the same genus as the mallard, the garganey, the teal and the wigeon but in a different genus to the tufted duck. These common names are useful in their way, but they fail to tell us anything about the organisms’ relationships with other species, and most would have to be dispensed with in any officially approved list. We would perhaps have the ‘teal duck’, the ‘wigeon duck’ and the ‘tufted scaup’ (to borrow a common name from its close relative), but I have no idea what we could do with the sorrels.

While I don’t mind telling someone that the little mushroom in their hand is called Tubaria furfuracea, I do feel embarrassed when informing them that they have a ‘scurfy twiglet’. There is nothing particularly wrong with these names, but they lack the weight and authority that comes with long usage. Also, I don’t think they really help: if people are having difficulty with names, the last thing they need is a whole new set of them. In my opinion, it is simply not possible to make up common names and expect them to become a useful currency.