Some people are calling for efforts to “decolonize” botany, which can be broadly understood to mean an attempt to decenter whiteness in botanical spaces; to honor the complex histories of botanical practices; and to make some form of reparations to the communities from whom the practices were taken.
That position ignores the great value the Linnaean system provides with standardized nomenclature. True, his 18th Century Eurocentric background froze the system in a Latin-esque posture. A new genus (back in 1975) named to honor the indigenous Apaches of the Chiricahua Mountains in Arizona had to be Latinized to Apacheria. Of course, the use of pseudo-Latin immediately tells you that it's a scientific name, not a common one. It's a monotypic genus in the odd little family Crossosomataceae. In so far has it never had a common name, someone decided to call it cliff brittlebush.
The full citation is A. chiricahuensis C.T. Mason. That would be Charles Mason, under whom I was awarded my PhD after Arthur Gibson bailed out of the U of A. Dr. Mason was the curator of the herbarium back in the day and I was a teaching assistant for his plant taxonomy courses.
Getting back to nomenclature, I find it instructive that plant common names are only capitalized if they involve proper nouns. Something like Fendler's bladderpod is capitalized because of the proper noun, Fendler. For a reasonably well-written summary of common names and their issues, see https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Common_name.
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