Racist plant names will change after historic vote by botanists

Re:Racist plant names will change after historic vote by bot... by erulabs on Friday July 19, 2024 @01:37PM (#41008939)

I don’t disagree, but a counter point is that no one has ever agreed on everything - and colloquial names for species already exist — and that language drifts to and fro like a fog. Statis in connotation or denotation sounds somehow totalitarian to me. Even outside of colloquial speech and in the world of science, everything should be in flux, shouldn’t it?

The idea that the whole world would use the same language sounds much worse than the opposite: that different people would act differently.

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Re:Racist plant names will change after historic vote by bot... by pvaldes on Friday July 19, 2024 @01:51PM (#41009117)

> no one has ever agreed on everything

Every biologist since 1700 agreed to use the Taxonomic rules (or tried, and failed, to improve the system). This collective project is one of our main success as species. Or maybe we should say "it was", that building has eroded a lot in the last 100 years.

That congress is basically the mess what happens where all scientists had been replaced by politicians.

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