Taxacom: Removals of offending scientific names

Thu Jun 22 09:49:30 CDT 2023

Nerdy, elitist gender agreement? Me thinking follow grammar being not so badly. But that's just me 😊, coming from a language well organized by grammar.
If you don't want gender agreement, create specific names as nouns in apposition, like abba, beccaloni, boris. And you are right, names are just labels.
I have recently seen a manuscript, hopefully soon to be published, that finds that naming after celebrities helps much with the visibility of taxonomy. This is important in these times where only things get recognized and supported that people are talking about.
Names are always a reflection of the time in which they were created. Eradicating history is counterproductive. We need to be reminded of these villains of the past, as often as possible.
Frank

Dr. Frank-Thorsten Krell

Senior Curator of Entomology, Editor-in-Chief
Commissioner and Councillor, International Commission on Zoological Nomenclature
Department of Zoology
Denver Museum of Nature & Science
2001 Colorado Blvd
Denver, Colorado 80205-5798, U.S.A.
Frank.krell at dmns.org
Phone 303.370.8244
Fax 303.331.6492
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-----Original Message-----
From: Taxacom <taxacom-bounces at lists.ku.edu> On Behalf Of George Beccaloni via Taxacom
Sent: Thursday, June 22, 2023 5:11 AM
To: Michael Heads <m.j.heads at gmail.com>
Cc: taxacom at lists.ku.edu
Subject: Re: Taxacom: Removals of offending scientific names

Names are just labels - there is no need to understand them. IMHO they
should be unchanging, and the nerdy, elitist requirements of the Code
relating to gender agreement should be scrapped as they make tracking names
difficult in our modern computerised world.

George
****************************************************************************
*Dr George Beccaloni FLS*
*Director, Alfred Russel Wallace Correspondence Project*

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****************************************************************************

On Thu, 22 Jun 2023 at 11:58, Michael Heads via Taxacom <
taxacom at lists.ku.edu> wrote:

> Abba is a good name for a genus - short, memorable...  I'm grateful that
> the 19th century taxonomists who named most of the genera in many groups
> *didn't* use the names of contemporary pop groups, pet politicians and
> other cultural ephemera. If they had, the names would now be
> meaningless, and we instead we can write with future users in mind. But
> preferences like this should not be law!
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Nurturing nuance while assailing ambiguity and admiring alliteration for about 36 years, 1987-2023.