I have been struggling with names. I don’t mean the normal effort it takes to remember people’s names. I struggle daily to remember and recognize names such as Sphenacondontiodae, Sinoconodontidae, and Procynosuchidae. Almost every day I struggle with a whole assortment of names that have been given to ancient groups of early mammal-like animals. All of these creatures lived a couple hundred million years ago, but they now enter into my daily struggle to recognize them by their true names.
The instructor of the course, Fossil record of mammals, rattles these names off as glibly as if he were talking about his young children or his assortment of cousins. I am amazed how someone can be so at ease and struggle so little in referencing these ancient lineages of mammal ancestors. He shows no hesitation in coming up with an assortment of syllables that are familiar to him and that concur up concepts of unique animals with recognized traits. I meanwhile struggle to pronounce the names and vaguely associate the names with certain kinds of animals.
It struck me this morning how I might do the same thing as my instructor if I would lead him through my garden. With little hesitation, I would point out plants, giving them both a common and a scientific name. In my garden, my common speech would easily be littered with names such as Lysimachia, Kirengeshoma, and Filipendula. As I spoke their names, I would have a clear concept of my association with that plant. Their name would remind me of certain traits of the plant, perhaps be a reference to other plants of the same family.
I still have a reasonable recall of several hundred names of plants, all of which I learned to recognize. I could, with little effort, call them by their proper and real name. Now, as I struggle to remember names of animals I will never see face to face, I think of how every discipline has a language of names unique to that area of familiarity.
The language of common speech is amazing enough in itself. Humans have come up with so many different sounds and words to describe what they experience. On top of practical common speech, there are so many unique names that describe individuals or groups of individuals.
I once went beyond my daily experience and learned to make sounds rising out of the Greek alphabet. I learned the names of many things in Latin, French and Spanish. Besides learning the names of ancient animals, I now struggle with a whole new group of names as my native culture embraces immigrants whose names sound nothing like those familiar names I grew up with: Tom, Nancy, and Charlie.
While names might be a struggle for me, they also are a kind of shorthand. It is useful for me to speak of a dog instead of four-legged animal with fur, a wagging tail and a bark. I can even speak of a specific animal as Jet, and people will know exactly which being I mean and what kind of being they are.
Learning new names seems like a good thing for me. My world of names is growing slowly in spite of my considerable struggle. I am happy for that growth, and so I work every day at learning new names. I am determined to force a few more names into my brain, and I am convinced that a few of those ancient mammals will become almost as familiar as the plants in my garden.