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The traditional objectivity of scientific writing sometimes leads scientists to inject a little of their personality into their nomenclature. Thus nuclear physicists measure not in nuclear cross sections but in barns ("as easy to hit as ..."), and some chemistry students I used to know referred to any sugar they couldn't identify as "godnose" or "whonose". Zoological taxonomy provides a rich field, starting with the amoeba Chaos chaos L., as Richard Conniff has found (Smithsonian, December 1996). Naming a beetle Agra vation presumably relieved some frustration the animal had caused, while arachnophobia emerges in the name Draculoides bramstokeri. But what amorous, if fickle, musings resulted in bugs being named Peggichisme, Polychisme and Dolichisme? Most of these "sounds-like" names are deliberate (e.g. the intellectual fly Phthiria relativitae), but Dyaria is a lepidopterist's unfortunate tribute to H.G.Dyar.

Among molluscs, Conliff mentions an unbelievable snail Ba humbugi, and the superheroic squid, Batoteuthis. In The Shell Makers, Alan Solem related how names may commemorate a resemblance - the ballerina-like muricid Typhina pavlova, or the circumstances of discovery - the clam Ascitellina urinatoria washed from "dredged mud in the scuppers of a small boat near the end of a long day at sea." For pinpoint accuracy it is hard to beat the name of the tiny snail Punctum pygmaeum, which resembles a .. Does this species rattle around in its genus, or share it with an as-yet undescribed ?? Or even a !!

Bill Bailey



 

 

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