Yol 'i9i9 XVI ] Seton, Popular Bird Names. 229 



ON THE POPULAR NAMES OF BIRDS. 



BY ERNEST THOMPSON SETON. 



Everyone who has studied the subject knows the enormous 

 projectile power of the exact right name when one wishes to secure 

 popular acceptation of any idea. The amount of effort and ability, 

 devoted by men in commerce to securing the right name is evi- 

 dence of the experienced view in dealing with the problem. Thou- 

 sands of dollars in prizes are offered for a good name to be given to 

 some new article, picture, idea, hotel or town. Because these 

 experts know that the happy name makes all the difference between 

 failure and nation-wide acceptation. 



We have precisely the same problem offered us in dealing with 

 our birds. The scientific names must, of course, be left to the 

 scientific experts, who, we must admit, take them very seriously; 

 but the popular names have been treated in a most casual or con- 

 temptuous way, in many cases ignored altogether. 



The attitude of the scientists recalls that of the pedantic classical 

 scholars of the early Queen Anne period. They had imbibed such 

 a contempt for the English language of the day that they set about 

 seriously to rewrite the King James Bible "in dignified English." 

 The first phrase of the Prodigal Son, for example, in the authorized 

 version is as follows : " A certain man had two sons and the younger 

 of them said to his father," etc. Such simple language, they 

 said, "savored of the nursery and stank of the gutter," so they 

 rewrote it, in their "dignified English" as follows: — "In remote 

 antiquity, antedating the meticulous epoch of precise chronology, 

 there was an opulent and distinguished gentleman who resided 

 in the agricultural district of the Orient, and was the progenitor of 

 two adult descendants of the masculine gender. Having attained 

 to majority and, presumably, the years of discretion, the junior 

 scion addressed his immediate ancestral paternal relative and 

 thus expressed the result of a prolonged, solitary and introspective 

 cogitation." 



This attitude of the Johnsonian school exactly parallels that of 

 our book ornithologists toward bird names evolved by the common 



