Taxacom: botanical names with racist history

[Stephen Thorpe]

There are two rather different cases to consider. The first is names which are based on words that have become a racial (or other kind of) slur. Somehow though, we seem to be able to still refer to a female dog as a bitch and a bastard file, etc., without causing offence! Why can't we do the same with taxonomic names? I guess because bitches and bastards aren't racial or homophobic slurs. A faggot in the sense of food doesn't seem to be used very often these days, but that might just be because the food it denotes isn't very popular. Do people still refer to raccoons as coons? Can that be done without offending black people? Who knows! Anyway, the other case is names based on people who were colonialists or otherwise persona non grata according to wokie ideology. Does mention of their very name cause offence? Should we care? I'm not offended by the name Hitler, even though the Nazis bombed my great grandma! Are we going to let oversensitivity and/or virtue signaling destroy biological nomenclature?
Stephen    On Tuesday, 23 July 2024 at 07:51:45 pm NZST, Paul van Rijckevorsel via Taxacom <taxacom at lists.ku.edu> wrote:  
 
 On 23/07/2024 03:06, David Campbell via Taxacom wrote:

[...] Given that the taxonomic usage seems to be based on an
     old geographic term, faulting the taxonomic names for later
     derogatory use seems excessive. A note that these names reflect
     the geography and not the racism would seem more in order, [...]

First, these are not necessarily based on an old geographic term, 
forexample, /caffraria/ will be geographic, but /caffrorum/ isn’t, at 
least not grammatically. Secondly, the argument would seem to fit best 
in cases of names based on Rhodesia versus names based on Cecil Rhodes, 
that is, cases of names based on formal names (of countries, etc) that 
are now obsolete. For informal designations, this would seem to quickly 
become very iffy. Paul
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