Archive for the ‘Taxonomic vs. common’ Category
February 26, 2024
From Chris Waigl on Facebook yesterday, coping with the day’s Spelling Bee game on the web, in which she was told that her candidate UNVOICING was not a word — well, not a word acceptable in the game. Her hedged response:
UNVOICING is a word. (Well, maybe.)
(CW is, among other things, a linguist, and linguists often have complaints about what Spelling Bee is willing to accept as a word of English.)
I’ll expand on CW’s comment, and that will take us to a surprising place (AI chatbots and their discontents). But first, some background on the NYT Spelling Bee.
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Posted in Common vs. proper, Language of science, Language play, Lexicography, Metaphor, Names, Ordinary vs. technical lg, Synonyms, Taxonomic vs. common, This blogging life, Titles, Toys and games | 2 Comments »
February 17, 2024
Or, for that matter, the eccentrically spelled elecamphane. This in reaction to a third plate from the 19th-century American Flora compendium that I’ve been posting about recently (“My wild valentine” posting here; “Daffodil poem” posting here). Which calls the plant elecamphane, but the name is elecampane, and everyone knows this plant as sneezeweed. The plate:
(#1) The usual spelling is elecampane; a net search turns up the ph spelling only on this American Flora plate — but in any case the flower is pretty clearly not elecampane (Inula helenium), but is instead a garden variety of the closely related common sneezeweed (Helenium autumnale), which is (to my eye anyway) considerably prettier than elecampane
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Posted in Art, Language and plants, Names, Taxonomic vs. common | Leave a Comment »
February 16, 2024
I slept from 7:30 to 4:15 last night, with some of the most distressing grotesque dreams I’ve ever had in my life, awakening frequently with terrible muscle cramps. Eventually I turned the dream around to something life-affirming and pleasant, but I awoke dead-exhausted from the night, confused and bewildered, and with screamingly sore muscles all over my body (for the record: I have had no fever or other clinical signs of infection, and I test negative for COVID).
Not really able to face the day, I retreated to botanical art from the 19th century, as presented to me recently by the Sierra Club, in a set of five greeting cards with flower illustrations from The American Flora of 1840-1855; see yesterday’s posting “My wild valentine”, about the plate of the wildflower Potentilla atrosanguinea. Another plate from the Sierra Club set — this time for a garden flower, a daffodil — caught my eye and moved me to toss off a little poem leading up to the label on the American Flora plate:
(#1) A poem to the intriguingly named three-anthered rush daffodil
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Posted in Art, Furnishings and tools, Language and plants, My life, Names, Poetry, Taxonomic vs. common | 4 Comments »
February 15, 2024
(Yes, a day late, but I’m barely functioning, so this is the best I can do.)
A fortuitous find. In my USPS mail, from the Sierra Club, a set of five 19th-century wildflower drawings on greeting cards: a free gift serving as leverage to get me to support their organization. Among the drawings, this intensely red Potentilla atrsosanguinea, with its very rose-like 5-petaled blossoms: a wild Valentine’s flower.
(#1) Blood-colored cinquefoil, Potentilla atrosanguinea, from The American Flora vol. III (1855)
Now: about the plant, and then about The American Flora.
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Posted in Art, Language and plants, Names, Taxonomic vs. common | 1 Comment »
July 25, 2022
From Benita Bendon Campbell yesterday, a delightful plant, new to her, that had just come into her life. Her photo:
(#1) A white Scaevola aemula cultivar, in a hanging pot; the plant grows as a garden shrub, but hangs or drapes quite satisfyingly, as here
The scaevola plant was new to me as well; it was hard to believe that I’d never come across a plant whose common name is fairy fan-flower and has cultivars that are intensely purplish-blue:
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Posted in Dance, Effeminacy, Gender and sexuality, Language and plants, Movies and tv, My life, Names, Taxonomic vs. common | Leave a Comment »
February 23, 2021
Among the scent notes in the “unisex perfume” A City on Fire — burnt match is another, but that doesn’t require looking things up — from the Imaginary Authors company, whose remarkable fragrances come with synopses of fictitious works of extravagant fiction and with striking graphic-designer labels on their bottles.
The perfumes aren’t cheap — $95 for a 50 ml bottle ($38 for a 14 ml Traveler size, $6 for a 2 ml Sample size) — but then we don’t know how many bottles get sold, and how much the perfumes are actually worn, as opposed to being treasured and displayed as art objects with an olfactory as well as visual and textual dimensions.
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Posted in Art, Fiction, Language and plants, Language in advertising, Linguists, Names, Semantics, Smell, Switzerland and Swiss things, Taxonomic vs. common, Trade names | 1 Comment »
August 5, 2020
Yesterday’s Wayno/Piraro Bizarro, with songs you just can’t get out of your head:
(#1) (If you’re puzzled by the odd symbols in the cartoon — Dan Piraro says there are 6 in this strip — see this Page.)
A wonderful collision of worlds, set off by the idiomatic (and colorfully metaphorical) N + N compound earworm: the world of DJs — the ear world (disc jockeys providing sonic pleasures for the ear) — and the world of caterpillars — the worm world (caterpillars being one type of worm in colloquial English).
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Posted in Abbreviation, Categorization and Labeling, Idioms, Initialisms, Language of sex, Linguistics in the comics, Metaphor, Music, Names, Taxonomic vs. common | Leave a Comment »
January 4, 2020
(Flowers and music for diversion in difficult times.)
Ann Burlingham, towards the end of her recent visit to family in Australia, posted photos of a poinciana tree in gorgeous bloom. Among them:
(#1) Royal poinciana or flame tree, Delonix regia, in the pea / bean family (the legumes, or Fabaceae)
(Note: it’s been extraordinarily hot in Oz, and significant parts of the southeast are consumed in flames, but Ann — and Jason and Henry — were far from the fire zone when she photographed the poinciana.)
An American friend of Ann’s commented, “I had never seen or heard of it before!” I responded, “Maybe you’d never heard about the flowering tree, but surely you’ve heard the jazz ballad.” But no. It seems that unless you’re into jazz or are really old — the heyday of “Poinciana” was apparently the 1940s through the 60s — you don’t know the song. (I’ve been asking around, and mostly just get blank stares.)
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Posted in Language and plants, Music, Names, Taxonomic vs. common | 3 Comments »
December 25, 2019
Yesterday’s posting “Hung with care” was about, among many other things, animal alphabets, including in #8 one from Sally King McBride (going from alligator A to zebra Z), about which Robert Coren asked in a comment:
(#1)
Do you happen to know who the “X” bird in #8 is? It’s the only one I can’t identify.
How many X birds could there be? you ask. Well, a fair number, but my guess on this one is the ovenbird xenops, but I could be wrong. (McBride is alive and working in NYC, so if someone wants to figure out how to get in touch with her and is willing to write to her, they might be able to find out her intentions and report on them here.)
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Posted in Language and animals, Names, Taxonomic vs. common | 9 Comments »
June 4, 2019
From an exchange on Facebook a few days ago, in which (at least) two of the participants use the term perennial to refer to plants that are green all year round, that don’t lose their leaves for a dormant season. The discussion was set off by DA (not knowing the privacy wishes of the participants, I refer to them by their initials), posting about a practice that puzzles him:
DA: I never understood why [people] bother to plant [fruit] trees that don’t bear fruit.
To which DS replied with a number of reasons for the practice, but along the way introducing perennial in the sense ‘green all year long’ (relevant materal boldfaced):
DS: They provide many other benefits, for birds, shade, soil augmentation … they hold together hills so they don’t wash away .. and much more. Besides, they can be lovely. As far as I know, there are no perennial fruit trees so they can’t be used for privacy.
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Posted in Derivation, Language and food, Language and plants, Metaphor, Names, Naming, Taxonomic vs. common | 5 Comments »
