Mosses usually lack common names because no one has bothered to give them

Evidence

We carefully catalog the positions of all the moss species, calling out their names. Dicranum scoparium. Plagiothecium denticulatum. The student struggling to record all this begs for shorter names. But mosses don’t usually have common names, for no one has bothered with them. They have only scientific names, conferred with legalistic formality according to protocol set up by Carolus Linnaeus, the great plant taxonomist. Even his own name, Carl Linne, the name his Swedish mother had given him, was Latinized in the interest of science. — Robin Wall Kimmerer, Gathering Moss, 47

Categorization

• XREF: The bilingual punnery on a bureaucratic credential and the naming-as-sovereignty logic connect to Along the Archival Grain’s colonial affect/taxonomy work and to the reader’s colonial-thread across the polyad. — connects to: Naming practices differ fundamentally between insider and outsider perspectives on a place — Robin Wall Kimmerer, Gathering Moss: A Natural and Cultural…, 50; The common name moss falsely spans lichens, algae, and flowering plants — Robin Wall Kimmerer, Gathering Moss: A Natural and Cultural…, 83
• QUESTION: Kimmerer flags that naming reflects relationship in Potawatomi; wonder whether the ‘no one has bothered’ phenomenon tracks Linnaean taxonomy’s treatment of non-flowering plants as infrastructure for flowering ones.

Broader Connections

• The common name moss falsely spans lichens, algae, and flowering plants #responds-to (0.85) — Robin Wall Kimmerer, Gathering Moss, 83