Taxacom: botanical names with racist history

[Stephen Thorpe]

Paul,
That doesn’t work. It might sort of work for this one case, but even then, everyone needs to be aware that historical usage of caffra is now to be treated as affra and it is going to be hard or impossible to generalise that to all objectionable epithets that the wokies will have a go at renaming next. The old name won’t just update by magic in the past literature. Even though caffra will no longer be used as the valid or preferred name, it will still be encountered and have to be known by anyone researching the species. It is still a synonym is the true sense of being an alternative name used in the literature for the same taxon, even if not in a more restrictive technical sense. 
Stephen 

Sent from my iPhone

> On 23/07/2024, at 2:04 AM, Paul van Rijckevorsel via Taxacom <taxacom at lists.ku.edu> wrote:
> 
> On 22/07/2024 12:39, Stephen Thorpe via Taxacom wrote:
> 
> ... it results in the objectionable names no longer
> being used as valid names, they still need to be
> used as synonyms ...
> 
> No, under the ICNafp, /Erythrina caffra/ and /Erythrina affra/
> (if that is indeed the new spelling) are one and the same
> name. One of these occurrences is spelled wrong (a typo), and
> the reader should ignore the typo. There is no possibility
> of synonyms (although Wikipedia will likely get it wrong).
> For synonyms it is necessary that names are separate entities,
> and here there is just the one name.
> 
> Paul
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