Read by Matilda Longbottom

Let’s talk about plant names. It turns out that there’s a lot more to them than just daisy or dandelion or tomato.

In Romeo and Juliet, Juliet’s most-quoted line is, “A rose by any other name would smell as sweet.” She meant that names are irrelevant. The fact that Romeo was a Montague, by definition a deadly enemy of her own family, the Capulets, was beside the point; Romeo, regardless of his unfortunate surname, was a sweetie-pie. It’s a nice sentiment, ranking right up there with, “You can’t tell a book by its cover,” and is meant to warn us not to make snap judgments based on superficialities.

The problem is that we all do it anyway, which explains the tragic and misguided ending of Romeo and Juliet.

More perspicacious was Anne Shirley of L.M. Montgomery’s Anne of Green Gables who laid it on the line: “I don’t believe a rose would be as nice if it was called a thistle or a skunk cabbage.” She’s right: it wouldn’t. Research shows us that names make a difference.

Companies with short, snappy names rake in more investors than those with lumpy multisyllabic monikers that nobody can pronounce. Women with gender-neutral names (Madison, Quinn) do better in traditionally male-dominated fields – say, engineering or law – than those with overtly feminine, names (Nancy Jennifer). This is known to psychologists as the Portia Hypothesis after – Shakespeare again – the heroine in The Merchant of Venice who disguises herself as a man and takes the name of Balthazar so she can argue her boyfriend’s case in court. If you’re an Emily or an Edward, you’re more likely to land a job or college admissions interview than a Latisha or a Jamal.

In a mere three seconds – even without meeting you – people leap to conclusions based on your name as to your age, race, socioeconomic status, character, appearance, intelligence, and chances of being a drug addict or a pickpocket. Think of where our minds go when confronted with a Jimbob versus an Alexander. Who’s the hillbilly, and who’s the particle physicist? And who’s cuter: Bertha or Diana? It’s a creepy effect, and given it, there’s a good argument to be made for all of us being known solely by our Social Security numbers.

Naming and re-naming are political weapons. An early example of weaponized naming was the flurry of labels for syphilis, a sexually transmitted disease that no one wanted to take credit for, and whose name became a 16^th-century hot potato. The British called it the French disease; the French, the Italian disease; the Dutch, the Spanish disease; the Russians, the Polish disease; and the Poles, the Turkish disease. The Turks, who blamed it on the Christians, called it the Christian disease.

The names that popped up in the wake of the 1918 influenza pandemic – the earliest documented case of which occurred in Kansas – similarly reflected a mean-spirited urge to shove the whole thing off on someone else: depending on where you weren’t from, it was variously known as Spanish flu, Flanders flu, Brazilian flu, French flu, German flu, the Russian pest, and – in Poland – Bolshevik disease. Japan, who blamed it on sumo wrestlers importing it from Taiwan, called it sumo flu.

World War I led to a positive frenzy of re-naming anything German: sauerkraut became liberty cabbage; hamburgers, liberty sandwiches; and – perhaps an overreach – German measles, liberty measles. During the Iraq War, Congress – annoyed by France’s refusal to support George W. Bush – dubbed French fries, “freedom fries.”

Plants, it turns out, are not immune from the political name games.

Until the mid-eighteenth century, plant names were up for grabs. Most were known by multiple common names which varied from botanist to botanist and place to place; and often, to add to the confusion, different plants were sometimes given the same common name. Scientists could never be sure who was talking about what – until the problem was solved by Swedish botanist Carl Linnaeus, whose passion for organization led to the publication in 1753 of Species Plantarum, a 1200-page compendium of plant species that introduced the world to the principle of binomial nomenclature. Linnaeus’s idea was to assign to each living thing a double-barreled Latinate name: the first a genus name based on biological relationships and the second a species name, an identifier that differentiated one plant or animal in a related group from everybody else.

Whoever discovers a new species gets to name it, which is where the trouble sets in. Some name species after themselves, their spouses, or a celebrity they particularly admire: hence Blakea attenboroughi, an Ecuadorian tree named for British naturalist and TV presenter David Attenborough; Cortinarius jonimitchelliae, a mushroom honoring Canadian singer-songwriter Joni Mitchell; and Rebutia einsteinii, a cactus named for Albert Einstein. Some picks seem iffy:

David Bowie and Angelina Jolie are both immortalized as spiders (Heteropoda davidbowie and Aptostichus angelinajolieae); Beyoncé as a horse fly (Scaptia beyonceae); Taylor Swift as a millipede (Nannaria swiftae); and Johnny Cash as a black tarantula discovered near Folsom Prison (Aphonopelma johnnycashi). And some are downright adversarial.

In 2018, for example, scientists in Panama discovered a new breed of caecilian – a slimy, serpentine, and near-blind amphibian, known for burying its head in the sand. Annoyed by Donald Trump’s policies on climate change, they proposed naming their find Dermophis donaldtrumpi.

Even Linnaeus was not above the occasional binomial low blow. His nemesis was Johann Georg Siegesbeck, a Prussian botanist, who objected vociferously to Linnaeus’s system of plant classification based on numbers of stamens and pistils. In other words, the Linnean schema boiled down to plant sex, a topic Siegesbeck deemed lewd, repugnant, loathsome, and unprintable. He wasn’t alone. “Who would have thought,” wrote one critic, “that bluebells, lilies, and onions could be up to such immorality?” but Linnaeus apparently found Siegesbeck particularly annoying. In retribution – never mess with a taxonomist – he gave Siegesbeck’s name to an invasive weed.

Naming, these days, isn’t quite the freewheeling affair that it was in Linnaeus’s day. Names now are regulated by the International Association for Plant Taxonomy. Perhaps it’s just as well: witness the experience of Britain’s Natural Environment Research Council, which in 2016 trustingly turned the naming of a new polar research vessel over to the general public via the internet. They were hoping for something in the proud tradition of the Shackleton or the Endeavour – but the winning name hands-down was Boaty McBoatface.

On the other hand, taxonomy still leaves room for a sense of humor.

There’s a species of Fijian land snail named Ba humbugi. ❖