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PaperclipPerfector  2yr ago (text post)   26372 thread views

Culture War Roundup for the week of October 30, 2023

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I dunno, "Long-billed, high-circle flying, special feathers to produce whistling sound Snipe" sounds longer and more cumbersome than "Wilson's Snipe". What's the local name for it? I'm sure local people have a local name instead of Ms. Nol needing to make up an "evocative" one.

You might need to be careful about asking for local names, or making up your own, though. Chesterton from his autobiography:

My father might have reminded people of Mr. Pickwick, except that he was always bearded and never bald; he wore spectacles and had all the Pickwickian evenness of temper and pleasure in the humours of travel. He was rather quiet than otherwise, but his quietude covered a great fertility of notions; and he certainly liked taking a rise out of people. I remember, to give one example of a hundred such inventions, how he gravely instructed some grave ladies in the names of flowers; dwelling especially on the rustic names given in certain localities. "The country people call them Sailors' Pen-knives," he would say in an offhand manner, after affecting to provide them with the full scientific name, or, "They call them Bakers' Bootlaces down in Lincolnshire, I believe"; and it is a fine example of human simplicity to note how far he found he could safely go in such instructive discourse. They followed him without revulsion when he said lightly, "Merely a sprig of wild bigamy." It was only when he added that there was a local variety known as Bishop's Bigamy, that the full depravity of his character began to dawn on their minds.

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