Everyone who has studied the subject knows the enormous projectile power of the exact right name when one wishes to secure popular acceptation of any idea. The amount of effort and ability, devoted by men in commerce to securing the right name is evidence of the experienced view in dealing with the problem. Thousands of dollars in prizes are offered for a good name to be given to some new article, picture, idea, hotel or town. Because these experts know that the happy name makes all the difference between failure and nation-wide acceptation.
We have precisely the same problem offered us in dealing with our birds. The scientific names must, of course, be left to the scientific experts, who, we must admit, take them very seriously; but the popular names have been treated in a most casual or contemptuous way, in many cases ignored altogether.
The attitude of the scientists recalls that of the pedantic classical scholars of the early Queen Anne period. They had imbibed such a contempt for the English language of the day that they set about seriously to rewrite the King James Bible “in dignified English.” The first phrase of the Prodigal Son, for example, in the authorized version is as follows: “A certain man had two sons and the younger of them said to his father,” etc. Such simple language, they said, “savored of the nursery and stank of the gutter,” so they rewrote it, in their “dignified English” as follows:—“In remote antiquity, antedating the meticulous epoch of precise chronology, there was an opulent and distinguished gentleman who resided in the agricultural district of the Orient, and was the progenitor of two adult descendants of the masculine gender. Having attained to majority and, presumably, the years of discretion, the junior scion addressed his immediate ancestral paternal relative and thus expressed the result of a prolonged, solitary and introspective cogitation.”
This attitude of the Johnsonian school exactly parallels that of our book ornithologists toward bird names evolved by the common people. And when I remind you that the so-called classical product is remorselessly scrapped now, and, further, that Skeat, the greatest modern authority on English, has warned us that, rules or no rules, grammar or no grammar, classics or no classics, the street language of London today will inevitably become the university language of England tomorrow; and the street language of modern New York, the university language of America, just as surely as the street language of Elizabeth’s time devoured alike the Norman French, and the Anglo-Saxon as well as the bastard classic of the pedants, and became at last the language of Oxford and Cambridge.
Now to apply this to our bird names.
If it is the aim of ornithology to spread a nation-wide knowledge of birds, then the popular names are at least as important as the Latin names.
In 1885, I wrote to ‘The Auk’ on the same subject, (Vol. 2, p. 316) and have no reason to change the views therein expressed.
The scientist, as such, has no more to do with the popular names of the birds than he has with the conjugation of the verb “to be,” for these are a growing part of the living language. And yet, the scientists have arrogated the sole right to dictate the popular names, even while they frankly and openly despise them; sometimes ignoring them altogether; sometimes condescendingly translating the scientific name into alleged English, saying that it was good enough. How far all this is wrong and harmful to bird study, I hope you will allow me to point out.
The popular name of a bird must always be produced by the genius of the language, speaking usually through some personal genius who makes a happy hit. The name must be simple, easily said, descriptive, short, and is much stronger if in some way it ties up the bird’s characteristics with familiar ideas.
For example, “Kingbird” is a success; is short, is of familiar elements, and describes the bird’s character. Every farm boy in its region knows the Kingbird, and by that name, except in a few localities where the rival name ‘Bee-martin’ still fogs the issue.