WRITING COMMON NAMES

During nearly a decade acting as the second and final editor of OBELISK, i.e., proofreading the assembled manuscript before it gets posted online, I’ve noticed a suite of common misunderstandings about how to properly write common names. Several changes were made to articles in the current issue, so in the hope that it will be of interest both to those particular authors as well as the rest of us who write about mosses and lichens, here’s a rundown of the firmly accepted universal convention for writing common names. In a word: uncapitalized.

Except for North American birds and North American fishes, whose names are officially specified by organizations with authority over the nomenclature of those groups (the American Ornithological Union and the American Fisheries Society, respectively), the common names of organisms are not capitalized. The only exception is when names have proper nouns in them, in which case the proper noun alone is capitalized. Hence, one might report having seen common haircap moss and Ohio haircap moss, but not Common Haircap Moss and Ohio Haircap Moss.

A related difficulty involves the construction of plurals of genera. A genus name is a taxonomic entity distinguished in writing by the use of italics, because it is a foreign (Latin) word. There is a temptation, when speaking of more than one species of a genus, to add an “s” to the genus name, but to keep it in italics, like so: “There were several Usneas collected during the foray.” Since the only taxonomically recognized genus name is “Usnea” it’s incorrect to use the artificially pluralized construction as if “Usneas” were a taxonomic name. One alternative is to use different phrasing such as “species of Usnea” or “Usnea species.” That can be awkward, so to keep the originally desired syntax, simply use the genus as a common name, uncapitalized and in regular font. “The were so many usneas there that we went crazy identifying them all!” There’s no ambiguity and it’s not really extraordinary to employ a genus name in this manner; you can go to the zoo and see a gorilla (Gorilla gorilla) drinking sassafras tea!

-Bob Klips