What's In A Name

WHAT’S IN A NAME?

I saw a beautiful little ringed plover the other day. It was beautiful; it was little; it was ringed; and I know it was a plover. But even another birder wouldn’t be sure what I saw. Because there is both a Ringed Plover and a Little Ringed Plover. But they would know there isn’t a Beautiful Little Ringed Plover.  There would have been that element of doubt if I’d left out any of those capitals.

 Large White: Great Black-backed Gull: Smooth-stalked Meadow Grass: Small Copper: the list is endless. But isn’t it being elitist to expect the reader to know that cream-coloured courser is the name of a species, and not the description of a bird. If you know your butterflies or your grasses you recognise the names. But what if you are a newcomer, a beginner. I once watched an aspiring young botanist become completely frozen out of a group of botanical recorders who were all conversing in scientific names, completely oblivious to the person who hitherto had only heard the vernacular names. How would you feel if the others in the hide all started pointing out birds in scientific nomenclature! But the same goes for the written word.

If I’m writing a nature note for a parish magazine it would be unfair to burden the readers with a scientific name, so the reader needs to know exactly what I’m talking about. They need to know that a Dipper is the name of the bird, not just an action.

So if we recognise that we have a convention for writing the scientific name in italics, with the initial letter of the generic name capitalised, and the specific name starting with a lower case letter (Rhinolophos hipposideros), why can’t we start the convention of capitalising ALL the initial letters of the vernacular name. Large Blue, Common Sandpiper, Blue Tit!