this post was submitted on 10 Jun 2023
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Nature and Gardening

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All things green, outdoors, and nature-y. Whether it's animals in their natural habitat, hiking trails and mountains, or planting a little garden for yourself (and everything in between), you can talk about it here.

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We write our plant tags out by hand on discarded vinyl blinds with indelible markers, and there's always the internal debate of whether it's better to be informal and recognizable or technically correct (because writing both gets tiresome). Personally I lean towards accuracy rather than approachability because technically correct is the best kind of correct, but even my plant friends think I'm a nerd. Who's with me?

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[–] [email protected] 5 points 1 year ago

When writing my PhD thesis I not only used the full latin name of the monkey species I studied, I even added the citation for the original, first description of it. It's something that should be standard, because when a species gets renamed you otherwise might not longer know what older texts are referred to, but entirely fell out of fashion in many disciplines. My PI actually marked the citation with "What is this?" and when I explained he said it's pretty old school but if I want, I can leave it...

I'd probably write both, but if I had to choose, latin, as it makes it more clear. And I'm not even thinking about "global", some common names are different in different regions of the same country, where the same name can describe two different species.