Common Names
Many plants and animals also have common and familiar names in the countries where they occur. In the case of plants, and even animals, the same common name is often applied to several different organisms within one country: a periwinkle can be a flowering plant or one of several kinds of intertidal snail. In the case of some animals especially birds, there is much greater uniformity in the use of common names, which generally refer to only a single species (although they are generally inclusive of subspecies).
In some case the scientific genus name has become the common name, for example, Hydra and Daphnia. The use of English common names is governed by the normal rules of grammar in English, and they are pluralised according to the same rules. Even though common names may appear to have roots in other languages, especially Latin or Greek, plurals of common names do not follow the grammatical rules of those languages. For example it is correct to refer to many hydras or many octopuses. However, when using the scientific binomial name or any other rank of the taxonomy, plurals are ordinarily not used at all.
Read more about this topic: Nomenclature Codes
Famous quotes containing the words common and/or names:
“If music in general is an imitation of history, opera in particular is an imitation of human willfulness; it is rooted in the fact that we not only have feelings but insist upon having them at whatever cost to ourselves.... The quality common to all the great operatic roles, e.g., Don Giovanni, Norma, Lucia, Tristan, Isolde, Brünnhilde, is that each of them is a passionate and willful state of being. In real life they would all be bores, even Don Giovanni.”
—W.H. (Wystan Hugh)
“The instincts of merry England lingered on here with exceptional vitality, and the symbolic customs which tradition has attached to each season of the year were yet a reality on Egdon. Indeed, the impulses of all such outlandish hamlets are pagan still: in these spots homage to nature, self-adoration, frantic gaieties, fragments of Teutonic rites to divinities whose names are forgotten, seem in some way or other to have survived mediaeval doctrine.”
—Thomas Hardy (1840–1928)