A WORD ON THE CAPITALIZATION OF BIRD NAMES

It's always bothered me that most media outlets don't capitalize the common names of birds.  I've just never understood why.  It's unnecessarily confusing  - does "I saw a yellow warbler" mean you saw the species Setophaga petechia or that you saw a warbler of the color yellow, like a Prothonotary or Pine Warbler?  

It also strikes me - as a birder - as disrespectful.  Birders are a species-centric bunch.  Field guides are divided into species, each one seeming to be its own separate brick - distinct but accommodating - in the birdlife structure.  Our lists are built by species one-by-one; the Carolina Chickadee only counts once no matter how many individuals you've seen.  To us, the combination of words creating a species' common name is the carrier of meaning, it's the it, it creates - quite literally - a proper noun. (Sometimes even capital letters at the start of the words aren't enough, and we distinguish species in bold or in all-caps.)

To cast that combination of words back among the unwashed lower-case, then, is to rob it of its magic.  To a birder it seems undignified.  To a scientist, though, treating species not as icons but as data (or, more likely, with a much better understanding of the muddy fluidity that is the "species" concept), or to a layperson, who couldn't give a crap either way, the common name is meaningless,  unworthy of extra typeface.

An English professor would explain that the difference is common vs. proper nouns.  The argument is that, basically, the common name of a bird species is not capitalized because there are lots of individuals of that bird.  So, while the words Eastern Bluebird refer to a unique species, they don't refer to a unique bird, and it should be just eastern bluebird.  

I think this is garbage.  Say what you will about common nouns, but there's nothing common about Common Goldeneye: the uncommon combination of those words means the author wasn't referring to some common goldeneye but a Common Goldeneye, an uncommon bird among all birds but one distinct from - and more common than - the uncommon Barrow's Goldeneye.  The "common-ness" of a common noun falls away when it refers to something specific.  

The academic distinction erodes further when talking about brand names.  Under most style guides, Jeep Golden Eagles and Plymouth Road Runners get the royal treatment but golden eagles and greater roadrunners don't.  Why is that?  Like a bird's common name, saying "Plymouth Road Runner" doesn't refer to a single car but a group of alike cars that are somehow distinguishable from others.   You're telling me that some stupid marketer's focus-grouped baloney gets capital letters but living creatures that have literally reshaped their own bodies over thousands of years to better survive harsh and changing environments are "common"?

Look, just capitalize your common species names, OK?  Show a little respect.

Avian Etymologies

I like thinking about bird names.  I've written about them before from different angles: about ones that are named after people; about what names they should have; about how they should be written; and maybe others. 

What I've been thinking about recently is the words for birds themselves.  It seems to me that words for birds are particularly interesting - from the unusual words (Owl, Osprey) to silly ones (Tit, Booby, Goatsucker), to obvious ones (Woodpecker, Stilt) to mysterious ones (pretty much everything else). How did these words evolve?  Are there trends?  Stories?  I did some digging through the OED - Online Etymology Dictionary to see what I could find.

The major trend - one I probably should have seen coming - is that a lot of bird names are echoic, or onomatopoeic.  In other words, the birds were named after the sounds they made.  It makes a lot of sense: naming a bird is great for when when there is a bird with either a) a unique call or b) not really another obvious thing to name it.  Here are some of the birds whose names originated because of their call:

• Owl - The word "owl" derives from the Latin word ulula, which, sure, sounds like an attempt at a hoot.
• Jay - from Late Latin's gaius, which is likely imitative.
• Crow - from Old English's crawe.
• Heron and Egret - These are sorta related.  The origin of "heron" is uncertain, but it's likely derived from the Proto-Indo-European word qriqi, which is thought to be echoic.  When that word reached the Old Provincal language in southern France around 1500, it had become aigreta, from which "egret" derived. 
• Finch - from a couple old German words like vinke and Fink, all thought to be imitations of the birds' call note.
• Goose - not really a surprise here. 
• Killdeer - not surprising, either.
• Warblers - not echoic in the correct sense, of course, but named after the fact that they sing.
• Curlew -  may be imitative of its cry, or also from an Old French word corliu meaning "runner, messanger" because they're good runners (?)
• Auk - of Scandinavian origins.
• Shrike - Yup, and probably related to "shriek"
• Chickadee - Obvi, first recorded in 1838.
• Bobolink - first used in American English in 1774, when it was known as bob-o-Lincoln.  Odd.

Some other birds were named, interestingly, after names for people:

• Petrel and Parrot -  Seems both dervice from the name Peter.  Petrels, so the (unconfirmed) story goes, were named for their habit of flying with their feet on the surface (think Storm-petrels): "walking on water" like the apostle Peter did on the Sea of Galilee.  Parrot, on the other hand, likely stems from a perrot, a version of Pierre.  
• Magpie -  These chattering birds were simply called pie in the original Latin, and the "Mag" part was added because it was a shortening of the name Margaret, a c. 1600 English slang term for talkative women. 
• Robin - a relative of Robert.  The term dates back to at least the 1300s, when the legend of Robin Hood was born.

Some other random interesting ones:

• Cormorant - results from the joining of corvus marinus, or Sea Raven.
• Mallard - likely came from the Latin masculus (which became mallardus in Middle Latin), which referred to any drake duck.
• Plover - from the Latin pluvia meaning "rain," because their spring arrival coincided with the start of the rainy season. 
• Vireo - The word is used by Pliny in Latin to describe some kind of green bird (from the root virere), and apparently was just later used to describe the North American birds by accident.
• Wren - from something Germanic, but no one's really sure what.
• Flamingo - from the Greek phoinikopteros meaning "red-colored."
• Bunting - the word bountyng was used to describe the bird in the 1300s, but no one's really sure why.  According to this valid internet source, if might from from the Welsh bontinog, which means "big-assed."!

Cool stuff, huh?  But what about the word "bird" itself?  Well, it's not really clear how we English-speaking folks came to use "bird" to describe all these winged creatures.  Typically, Old English speakers used fugol to talk about birds, and used bridd to talk about "young birds or nestlings."  Bridd somehow became bird, but no one really knows where bridd came from, as it has "no cognates in any other Germanic language."  Fine with me, I'll keep the mystery.