If you don’t know who Juliet is in this case that’s okay, but that also suggests you are not old school and ravinginbeantown is about as old school as it gets, and you should reconsider whether to continue. You have been warned. The question is not one a person hears or asks every day or perhaps maybe never, but the line is from a still-famous play by a still-famous playwright of 400 years ago, and people who’ve never seen Romeo and Juliet still tend to know a few things about it (“tragic love story” “was made into many films” “provided the inspiration for West Side Story”) along with having heard about William Shakespeare the playwright. I say this as an American and for all I know those living in England who remain ignorant of The Bard and his output are at risk of having their citizenship revoked and possible deportation, probably to America.
(White-breasted nuthatch; Sitta carolinensus, from Greek sitte, as used by Aristotle for “bird that pecks at the bark of trees”, and Latin, of Carolina; aka topsy-turvy bird, treemouse, yank)
It is also a fact that The Hip-hop Shakespeare Company has been around for over a decade, there in England, and many hip-hop artists have made a number of references to the man in their work, so Shakespeare’s name is not about to disappear into the cultural ether any time soon. In some way his work is evidently still “relevant”, but an entire hip-hop production of a Shakespeare play has yet to hit it big, which includes that one about young lovers and their ill-fated affair.
(Downy woodpecker; Picoides pubescens, from Greek pics, woodpecker or resembling woodpeckers, and Latin, with hairs of puberty, downy; aka black and white driller, little guinea woodpecker, little sapsucker, Tommy woodpecker)
But for now we’re sticking with old school and the fact that public education in America once meant high schoolers were usually exposed to such plays as Macbeth and maybe Hamlet, and to lighten the burden of absorbing such high culture maybe a dose of Romeo and Juliet. Many if not most people have heard the line “to be or not to be” and my mother was very proud of the fact she could recite the opening of Macbeth’s “dagger speech” which she had to learn in high school in the late 1930s. One assumes she enjoyed the play, and never watching one of the great film productions of it in her company was a missed opportunity. I’d have lobbied for the 1971 Polanski version but my guess is she’d have preferred the 2010 Royal Shakespeare Company production with Patrick Stewart, as she was a big Star Trek fan. Of course by 2010 she was 88 years old and might’ve struggled with staying awake (Shakespeare on TV can generate that) but I’d have awakened her to watch the dagger speech.
(Mourning dove; Zenaida macroura, genus derived from the name of French ornithologist Charles Lucien Bonaparte’s wife, Zenaide Charlotte Julie Bonaparte – and if the name sounds familiar, it’s because Napoleon was Chaz’s uncle, and Greek makros, long and oura, tail; aka moaning dove, turtle dove, wild dove, wood dove, wild pigeon, and sadly, passenger pigeon back before those were gunned into extinction)
The line from R and J most are likely to know is “Romeo Romeo wherefore art thou Romeo?” from the “balcony” scene, in which she’s launching into a whole speech about why is he “Romeo” and her issues with the two of them being stuck with these names that generate more problems than they’re worth. What’s problematic is that many know it as “Romeo Romeo where art thou Romeo?” like she’s trying to find him in the bushes down below or something, which makes it kind of trivial and almost silly. It’s likely that this misquote showed up in a few cartoons (Bugs Bunny?) and movies or comic routines, and all of this is most unfortunate, as it all leads up to Juliet asking “What’s in a name? That which we call a rose/ By any other name would smell as sweet.” If you’re truly old school you already know some or all of this, and how her gripe is that their torrid teen affair is getting messed up by the ongoing conflict between their families, the Montagues and the Capulets (or the Jets and Sharks, if you know that story better).
(Blue jay; Cyanocitta crostata, from Greek kyanos, blue, and kitta, chattering bird, and Latin cristatus, crested; aka common jay, bluecoat, corn thief, nest robber, jay-bird)
Juliet’s point is that her fella’s name, Romeo Montague, says nothing at all about him that truly matters, in her mind, and if he’d just dump it somehow (she offers to do the same with hers), their path to passion and a blissful future would be assured. Of course he tells her he’s totally on board with this, if it means attaining her love. In some ways this is quite profound, but at the same time it’s just the yearning and romantic banter of a couple of smitten innocents, whose eventual clash with the harsh realities of politics and family feuding will make for a gripping and beautiful tale, a classic, as it were. Or course the author’s brilliance with the language of his day also helped a bit, and the sooner Lin-Manuel Miranda offers to the modern world his version of the play, the better. Or maybe not.
(House finch; Carpodacus mexicanus, from Greek karpos, fruit, and dakos, eater, and Latin, of Mexico; aka burion, crimson-fronted finch, red-head, red-headed linnet, Guadalupe house finch)
What Juliet overlooks in her musings, and what Wm S. found of little or no interest regarding his dramatic purposes in the case of that speech, is that having names for things is incredibly useful, if not downright essential, for the basic workings of the world, or at least the world of humans. A name is an identifier, and just for that it is important and worthwhile. In fact, J’s dismissal of names results precisely from her frustration with the power they have over things that matter. But even if you’re not a Montague or a Capulet, or a Rockefeller or a Kennedy or even a Kardashian, to name but a few, you know that your name, as humble as it may be, means a lot of things. Your last name connects you to your family story, and even your first name has its own story. A first name might be connected to family history, but it might also have resulted from one’s parents’ fascination with a movie or rock star, or can simply reflect what was popular at the time.
There was a popular teen movie star of the ‘30s, Deanna Durbin, who was already obscure by the 1950s, and the only Deanna I ever knew personally was a friend from junior high. When I asked her if she was named after that actress, she just rolled her eyes. D’s surname happened to be Durr. For decades in America a preponderance of babies got labeled John and William and Mary and Linda and names of that ilk, until about 1970 when we started getting lots of Jessicas and Christophers, Jasons and Emilys and my personal faves, Brittany and Tiffany. Lately we’ve had a flood of Olivias and Emmas, Liams and Noahs. Go figure.
(American Goldfinch; Carduelis tristis, from Latin carduus, thistle, and tristis, sad, after the bird’s plaintive call; aka catnip bird, beet-bird, lettuce-bird, salad-bird, shiner, wild canary, yellowbird, thistle-bird)
But personal names come and go, and their use happens to be peculiar to the particular animal that we are on this planet (though I recently read that every orca has its own distinct whistle that it presents when it encounters other fellow creatures, especially strangers from outside the family pod, so the jury is still out on this one). While we’ve countless names to go by that identify us in the world of humans, there is agreement amongst people who care about such things – the scientists and specifically the biologists, and among them the taxonomists – that “homo sapiens” is our single bona fide sanctioned identifier in the whole grand world of creatures, and about that there shall be no confusion, ever, and ain’t that a great thing? Chances are the IRS or the post office might’ve confused you with somebody else at some point, and wasn’t that a mess? There was a woman in my college class named Barbara Bernstein and the registrar confused her with several other Barbara Bernsteins so many times that she finally legally adopted the middle name “Xanthippus”, making her Barbara X. Bernstein. This solved her problems right then and there and maybe for the rest of her life, and was this not a very cool move?
(Dark-eyed junco; Junco hyemalis, possibly from Latin, juncus, rush, and hiemalis, of winter; aka black chipping bird, black snowbird, blue snowbird, gray snowbird, snowbird, white-bill; it is worthy of note that until quite recent times, there were a number of junco species: in the east we had the slate-colored but going west there was the Oregon, the white-winged, and the gray-headed, until one fine day the powers that be declared they were all sub variants of a single species now known as the dark-eyed)
As is the way with taxonomy, our genus name homo comes from Latin and means “human,” while sapiens is also Latin for “one who knows” or “wise man” (sounds a bit arrogant, don’t you think? but then we are, after all). The “sapiens” designation distinguishes the humans of today from the eight versions of humans, or homo, that preceded us in the grand scheme of evolution, which includes groups like the neanderthals and all the others who died out out a long time ago. Juliet in her passion might not have cared a whit about such things, preoccupied as she was with the story that would eventually spell her end, but for the rest of us the story of naming can be quite compelling. In the world of science, agreeing upon the names for things is of crucial importance when it comes to keeping it all straight, which is how taxonomy came to be in the first place, the modern version of which started with the Swede, Carolus Linnaeus, back in the 1750s.
(Cooper’s hawk; Accipiter cooperii, from Latin, a bird of prey, and after William Cooper of New York, who provided skins to our old friend, Charles Lucien Bonaparte, who named and described the bird for science in 1828; aka blue darter, chap-hawk, eagle hawk, gopher hawk, squirrel hawk, squirrel-proof feeder hawk)
C’s innovation was basically a simplified version of what had been the common practice up until then, whereby early taxonomists named earthly flora and fauna with sometimes long-winded descriptive phrases. Humanity’s basic naming of things no doubt began with the advent of language, while the first comprehensive study of this, as with so many things, first appeared in the works of Aristotle. Not much of significance was done to advance the cause until the Renaissance and the work of an Italian physician, Andrea Cesalpino, and his epic work of 1583 describing and naming plants, De Plantis. Linnaeus brought us into modern times in 1759 with his 10th edition of Systema Naturae, which comprehensively distilled things down to two names for everything, one for the genus and one for the species, hence the term “binomial nomenclature.” If you’ve taken a basic biology class, you learned of the “scientific name” for things, and likely not much more than that (except what was needed to pass the test, which you afterwards forgot) because scientific names are daunting: usually unpronounceable and hard to spell, and they sound like Latin and/or Greek and are often comprised of both, but would you believe sometimes they are neither?
(Red-tailed hawk; Buteo jamaiacensis, after Latin, a kind of falcon or hawk, and the Caribbean island where the first specimens were provided to science; aka buzzard, buzzard hawk, hen hawk, mouse hawk, red hawk, and it should be noted that in farm country most every bird of prey has been given the name “chicken hawk” since the advent of agriculture)
I once made the mistake of asking about “the Latin name” for some species we saw on a birding trip, and the guide thereupon lectured me about how what I wanted was the “scientific name” that included some of what you’ve been reading here. He opened my eyes regarding how common bird names can get confusing (a house sparrow is not really a sparrow, many birds of the same genus are called “hawks” in America and “buzzards” in Europe, etc) while scientific names provide the true links as to how various species are related and above all, final agreement on the identifiers for all living things. And did I also complain about how scientific names are difficult to spell and pronounce and remember? which is why most of us avoid them, for the most part, even those of us who flatter ourselves as being good spellers. We love the birds and the flowers but we are neither ornithologists nor botanists.
(Canada goose – and please try to never say “Canadian”, and thanks; Branta canadensis, most unusually from New Latin or possibly Anglo Saxon, brennan, to burn, which suggests the charred dark brown of many types of goose, and Latin, of Canada; aka bay goose, big gray goose, black-headed goose, calling goose, cravat goose, honker, long-necked goose, reef goose, fairway goose)
And amongst us amateurs, scientific names don’t really tell much of a story or describe anything in a language we understand, which makes them kind of boring, wouldn’t you say? And you’d be sort of right but perhaps also a bit uncurious and ignorant (no offense meant). Of course if you’ve been paying close attention to the examples thus far maybe you’ve noticed that scientific names make an earnest attempt at being descriptive (and teach us all a little bit of Latin and Greek in the mean time) and historic and sometimes even tell a pretty good story of their own.
(Common merganser; Mergus merganser, from Latin, a diver, and Latin, mergere, to dip, plunge; aka American goosander, American sheldrake, big sheldrake, break horn, dun diver, fish duck, morocco-head, pond sheldrake, sawbill, winter sheldrake)
What’s left in this picture is all that is delightful and interesting and perhaps unknown regarding the so-called “common” names, the ones we all know and upon which we supposedly agree, in a language we all share and know and love. The first thing you need to know is that the “common” name offered by your field guide for birds or trees or flowers or dragonflies or lizards or whatever, is not common insofar as it is not exactly the result of folk wisdom or the will of the people, but stems from some decision by some committee, same as with scientific names. In the case of birds this happens to be the North American Classification Committee of the American Ornithologists Union, or the NACC of the AOC, for short.
(Hooded merganser; Lophodytes cucullatus, after Greek, lophos, crest, and dytes, diver, and Latin, hooded; aka fan-crested duck, hairy crown, hairy head, hooded sheldrake, little fish duck, little saw-bill duck, little sheldrake, moss-head, mud sheldrake, pickax sheldrake, pond sheldrake, round-crested duck, saw-bill diver, spike bill, summer sheldrake, swamp sheldrake, tadpole, tow-head, tree duck, water pheasant, wood sheldrake – why this bird has such an abundance of names compared to the others remains a mystery, but are they not all a hoot? It should be noted that these birds show up reliably on Jamaica Pond every winter – this winter saw a flock of over 100 for several months – hence they’re our ‘winter sheldrake’, whereas they’re the ‘summer sheldrake’ on the Canadian prairies and points north; also this bird is indeed little compared to the Common, a bit over half the size and one third its weight)
Thus at some point in the ‘90s the rufous-sided towhee we all knew and loved by that name in MA and elsewhere on this side of the continent became the eastern towhee, while out west the rufous-sided (also known as the Oregon by some) was declared by the NACC of the AOC to be the spotted. Being scientists, that committee was not being capricious or arbitrary but was using recent DNA discoveries that revealed the r-s was not one species but two. This story also shows some of the ways common names can be problematic, and did you also know that towhees are in the sparrow family?
(Common grackle; Quiscala quiscula, both names whose origin is a bit of a mystery, though speculation suggests that Linnaeus derived them from the native language of the Caribbean Taino tribe, quisqueya, which was their word for the island of Hispaniola and meant “mother of all lands”; aka blackbird, bronzed grackle, China-eyed blackbird, crow blackbird, Florida grackle, keel-tailed grackle, maize thief, New England jackdaw, purple grackle, purple jackdaw, white-eyed jackdaw)
The final point to be made here is that the “common” names in the field guides, the ones we all know and love and grew up with and upon which we all tend to agree (because of that committee) tend to be only one common name among many, if one looks back in time. Think about it: humans have been experiencing and naming the abundance of the natural world since long before any authorities took over, foremost among these farmers and hunters or pretty much anybody from a rural area – and don’t forget how the entire planet at one point was a “rural” area. What is curious is how the legacy of species’ common names has lapsed into obscurity. Which is a pity, for in these matters that is where one finds the real poetry, or at least of the kind that comes from “the people”, the kind of thing of which even Juliet and the author who conjured her up might’ve approved. Common names are experiential, can be descriptive based on appearance or sound or behavior or even outright nasty prejudice (take a look at the names for the poor innocent house sparrow, if you don’t believe me, or better yet read my passionate defense of Passer domesticus elsewhere on this blogsite it’ll break your heart if you have one).
(House or English Sparrow; Passer domesticus, from Latin, passer, sparrow, and Latin, domus, house; aka domestic sparrow, gamin, hoodlum, tramp, little brown job)
You’ve been treated here to many curious and expressive and sometimes downright odd common names, and if you go looking for more that describe your favorite feathered friend that was left out, good luck to you. You might also have to dig pretty deep to get the skinny on the derivation of the scientific name, as well. We own many many field guides and other avian-oriented “reference” books of all kinds, most of which give the scientific names as well as the sanctioned committee-designated common names, but nothing else. Of course a clever web search might be fruitful regarding these things, but the gold mine source is the very old school Audubon Society Encyclopedia of North American Birds, that defines “comprehensive” when it comes to all the basic information one might care to know and much one might’ve never considered, such as flight speeds or records of the longest-lived examples, stuff like that. It is also cumbersome and kind of slow to use (remember the Encyclopedia Brittanica? do you miss it?) but as far as I know it’s unique in all the world and how many things are like that? This book is where the informational poetry (if there is such a thing) can be found, and if Juliet were to own one bird book this would probably be it.
(American robin; Turdus migratorius, from Latin, a thrush, and migrator, wanderer, wandering; aka Canada robin, common robin, migratory thrush, northern robin, redbreast, robin redbreast, San Lucas robin, southern robin, western robin – please note that the bird pictured is a juvenile and lacks the distinctive red-orange breast)
(European starling; Sternus vulgaris, Latin for starling and common, which suggests ancient Rome knew all about them; aka church-martin, common starling, English starling, European starling; it is appropriate to finish with this bird, introduced to North America in the late 19th century by various people who wanted to bring over all their favorite European plants and animals for various sentimental and “practical” reasons, which in the end were mostly bogus and quite destructive, as it tends to go with such efforts – but a rumor has persisted that one goal was to introduce “all the birds mentioned in Shakespeare” that is unfortunately unsubstantiated but at least they brought his plays and poetry over and ain’t that more than enough? Though if you’ve never seen a starling murmuration you haven’t lived)
