I’ll be dead in the cold ground before i call them “poppies” instead of “Irishman’s delight”.
this post was submitted on 19 Jul 2024
167 points (98.3% liked)
Botany
417 readers
1 users here now
founded 2 years ago
MODERATORS
despite what some mewling racists will claim, this is unambiguously good and cool
What about sad database maintainers who never thought the names would change /s
they stand to benefit more than anyone! just imagine all the billable hours!
Hundreds of Latin plant names had a version of the K-word racial slur in them, wtf.
Glad that South African Scientists advocated for this change. That is a horrific word. For Americans here, imagine if hundreds of plants had a variation of the N-word in their name. That's how bad that word is.
Americans somehow handle "Nigeria". These plants were named before the word became offensive. We shouldn't be putting scientific nomenclature on the euphemism treadmill, IMO.
And what would be different if we changed it?
Right, nothing.
Science is and always has been about updating information. That is what differentiates it from say religion, which stays in the exact same spot no matter what. Let's not be like religion.
Once you get on the euphemism treadmill, you're going to have a hard time getting off. They're already talking about making more changes:
A second change to the rules for naming plants that aimed to address problematic names, such as those recognizing people who profited from the transatlantic slave trade, also passed — albeit in a watered-down form
IMO the only hard line, and the one that should have been drawn, is that scientific names are only changed due to new discoveries in cladistics. Following wherever the winds of popular culture happen to blow isn't "updating information" in a positive sense.
This is a good thing. Unwinding past racism is part of the commitment to end contemporary racism.
So glad the election is stealing the media spotlight or we'd never hear the end of Woke-Plants and the liberal agenda to erase history.
Never heard the word "caffra" before. Is it only used in South Africa?
I'd never heard it either, but Wikipedia has a full entry on it:
https://en.m.wikipedia.org/wiki/Kaffir_(racial_term)
I wasn't sure if it was the same as the taxonomic term (since they're spelled differently), but one of the trees in question is included in the "see also" section and the descriptions of the words in question seem to match, so I guess it is.
According to Wikipedia it's referred to as the "k-word" in South Africa, so I assume it's a pretty strong slur there.
It is the South African version of the n-word (I think SA racists also use the n-word, but the k-word carries the same weight. It is an Arabic word meaning "infidel", which means "no faith/belief". Islamic traders down the East African coast used it to refer to non-Muslim inhabitants of Africa.
My first time playing World of Warcraft I wanted to make a fire mage. I wanted the name to sound cool and mystic. My younger self went and kept trying various combinations of words that would imply I was a fire mage. Gotta have the word fire in it, right? What other fantasy sounding prefix can I add to it? Kha sounds cool and mage-y.
Khafire. Way too close to that word and I didn't realize it till weeks later.
I'm not buying new books, I'm very poor.