Canine Terms in Popular Names of Plants

Abstract

THIS ARTICLE REPRESENTS an attempt to collect and classify the recorded I plant names containing the terms bitch, dog, hound, and pup or puppy. It is the third of a series' and is based, as the sources indicate, on the main comprehensive dictionaries of the English and American languages, including: the most important dialect dictionary; the eighty volumes published by the English Dialect Society, of which the most useful was number twenty-two, A Dictionary of English Plant-Names, by James Britten and Robert Holland; the well-known botanical dictionaries, headed by the indispensable polyglot compilation of Gerth H. L. Van Wijk; and many other smaller name lists reporting on restricted geographical or cultural areas. Among the most recent books, Geoffrey Grigson's The Englishman's Flora has been a stimulating aid. I have endeavored to explore, at least from an aerial view, the mountain peaks of plant nomenclature from Theophrastus to Asa Gray and have had constantly on my desk a small stack of admonitory guides to the elements of botany. Though this study is an essay in linguistics mainly, I have in dealing with each name tried to hold in mind a picture of the plant, a picture obtained either from my own firsthand field experiences or those of others, recorded in photograph or illustration. Here I have found most useful Gleason's Illustrated Flora. As each name brought to mind a physical plant shape and some canine feature with it, I have in each instance sought the reason why this or that flower, shrub, or tree was designated with a canine term. Sometimes the solution, being on the physical plane, was easy; but often all clues failed except the one most frequently lurking in the polysemy of dog and related words: the general tendency of ungrateful man to use these names in pejorative meanings. No sizable list of scientific names is of absolute authority, although the work of Kelsey and Dayton (to mention but one modern example) shows what can be done in the way of satisfying the requirements of accuracy and completeness. These desiderata are far more remote in the collecting of popular plant names, where the best that can be hoped for is a kind of controlled anarchy, where synonyms accumulate with dizzying rapidity or, conversely ,where such names as Mayflower and bluebell are affixed to several unrelated plants.