My young daughter can identify a whole host of native species by their scientific names and it absolutely floors adults who catch her doing it. Our house is a plant nerd house so she just picked it all up on her own and enjoys it as a small component of her life.

One of my father's coworkers (environmental health & safety) was an entomologist. I wonder how much of her work was in forensics.

Our family is Catholic, and Mom hates Latin, so as a reactionary I absolutely love it. As a child about 10 years old, I began to collect books called "Field Guide" such as Field Guide to Spiders and Field Guide to Butterflies and so forth. These were wonderful, glossy illustrated handbooks, and while the only field trips I made were into our suburban backyard, we saw a quality mix of flora and fauna because of Dad's gardening and our proximity to a canyon.

And the index would have all scientific names listed, and so I set myself to the task of memorizing as many as possible. I hardly recall any today, except apis mellifera and mosca domestica but I can tell you, it was really influential for my social life at recess to be blurting out the Latin names of creepy-crawlies. Harry Potter was still at least 15 years in the future, then, and none of the girls showed interest in field trips.

His interview with the old railworker and grease-pen graffiti artist Colossus of Roads was fascinating. Unfortunately I cant find it on youtube anymore with a quick search, otherwise I'd put the link here.

Wow this is fantastic stuff. Thank you

I am lost they have training videos, they have a reading list, they have tutorials... everything you need to get started. How else would you acquire skills? There is no upload function yet.

Congratulations! Add a water feature ... it will attract birds. And next to that some smaller shrubs. Then once the trees grow you can put climbers and ferns in them. And throw down some rocks for good measure. It encourages variant microclimates which encourages biodiversity.

Agreed. The author in question (Linnaeus) was from Sweden and professor at a Swedish university (Uppsala). Latin was used across the board in "traditional" sciences in northern Europe at that time and in fact the distinction of disciplines was not as clear as it is today. Linnaeus was a professor of medicine formally but focused on botany. He traveled a lot and had many international "contacts", especially in the Netherlands. His correspondence was usually a mix of Swedish and Latin (which I find interesting because I assume Swedish was not widely studied at the time) but his professional publications were in Latin.

But it was an interesting time as slowly native languages became more common. The chair for economic sciences at Uppsala was specifically to be taught in Swedish (1741).

Southern and central Europe were ahead of the curve a bit and it was more common to see French, English and German for example (French and English scientific journals date back to the 1660s).

For more information, I can recommend "Languages of science in the eighteenth century" by Britt-Louise Gunnarsson which specifically focuses on Linnaeus. It's Open Access: https://www.degruyterbrill.com/document/doi/10.1515/97831102...

Of all the things you could criticize as backwards in 18th century biology, the choice of using Latin is probably the silliest. It was the language of learning. It's a practical choice that you and I would make if we were transported to that time.

The way I parsed the sentence, the backwards and goofy part is just the """he was probably mostly thinking of “white European cultures”""", not the choice of Latin. Just a concilatory disclaimer to avoid being cancelled for talking good things about someone born before the abolition of slavery.

Luckily the author continues with

> I say this because a few unthinking “performative leftist” nitwits as of late have decided to attack the science of taxonomy itself).

It's an interesting topic, though. If Latin is backwards because of assocation with European cultures, what are biologists nowadays proposing to replace it with? Some kind of universal coding system like ISBN or DOI?

More scientific lectures should be delivered with a blue collar Chicago dialect and accent.

Simlish was intentionally designed to be linguistically neutral, so we didn't have to laboriously translate all the game audio into dozens of languages.

https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Simlish

For the same reason, botanical nomenclature should obviously be standardized in Simlish. Sul sul, Laganaphyllis simnovorii!

Laganaphyllis simnovorii is the scientific name of the Cowplant, literally suggestive of a plant that devours Sims. It first appeared under that name in The Sims 2: University as a Natural Science career reward. The Sims 3 Store also uses the full name officially.

https://sims.fandom.com/wiki/Laganaphyllis_simnovorii

>This bizarre bovine vegetation is large enough to swallow your next-door neighbor whole. In fact, it WILL eat your neighbors. Your friends will be hard-pressed to resist the tantalizing vine-cake of the carnivorous Laganaphyllis Simnovorii. After it has consumed some prey, milk it for sweet, rejuvenating nectar of life. A swig of this liquid refreshment will add precious days to a Sim's life and wash away any regret they may have over their visitor's fate.

A proposed technical lexicon:

Plant: floragerb. Flora: floragerbia. Vegetation: verdigerbium. Fruit: pomofroob. Vegetable: olerinoob. Root: radixgerb. Stem: caulob. Leaf: folinurb. Flower: anthofleeb. Seed: seminib. Pollen: pollinoob. Spore: sporib. Cell: cellubo. Cell wall: muracellum. Chlorophyll: chlorofleebin. Photosynthesis: photofroobulation. Cellular respiration: respiragerbation. Germination: germinoobulation. Pollination: pollifleebation. Fertilization: gametogerbination. Transpiration: evapofleebulation. Xylem: xyloob. Phloem: phleebum. Stoma: stomabo. Phylogeny: ancestragerbics. Morphology: formagerbology. Binomial nomenclature: duonominoobulation.

Because latin was common only for part of one continent where he happened to be and not to the rest of the world while english happens to be spoken all over the globe due to a big goofy empire that went places.

However, let's keep out the culture wars from a post mainly about plants.