Posted: 09 Dec 2003, 01:36
Fascinating thread - scientific names must take precedence over common names of course, simply because of the enormous potential and actual confusion over differences. I can think of many situations in which fish have several different common names, alluding to the problem spiny wrote about.
An especially common source of confusion is evident when speaking of houseplants also, where a rose by any other name might be very different than another.
I try to make it a habit to learn the scientific names of my fish (mostly silver tetras) and my houseplants (mostly green ones with leaves). Having said that I hope there isn't a pop quiz, but if I ever need help, I'm thinking the guy I really need to talk to probably knows the latin name - it's almost a test of qualification
If I tell you a jack is a fish that we could go fishing for (round here), and you caught one, tell me would you put your fingers in his mouth to grab the hook?
If I tell you we're going to boat an Esox lucius, would you reconsider?
FOR THOSE INTERESTED IN METRIC CONVERSION: If you run XP (please don't flame me) you can d/l a free upgrade to the standard Windows calculator from here that does on the fly metric conversions and lots of other cool things besides, it's actually, um, useful
http://www.microsoft.com/windowsxp/pro/ ... ertoys.asp
Sorry for the long post
An especially common source of confusion is evident when speaking of houseplants also, where a rose by any other name might be very different than another.
I try to make it a habit to learn the scientific names of my fish (mostly silver tetras) and my houseplants (mostly green ones with leaves). Having said that I hope there isn't a pop quiz, but if I ever need help, I'm thinking the guy I really need to talk to probably knows the latin name - it's almost a test of qualification
If I tell you a jack is a fish that we could go fishing for (round here), and you caught one, tell me would you put your fingers in his mouth to grab the hook?
If I tell you we're going to boat an Esox lucius, would you reconsider?
FOR THOSE INTERESTED IN METRIC CONVERSION: If you run XP (please don't flame me) you can d/l a free upgrade to the standard Windows calculator from here that does on the fly metric conversions and lots of other cool things besides, it's actually, um, useful
http://www.microsoft.com/windowsxp/pro/ ... ertoys.asp
Sorry for the long post