February, ’23] 
BUSINESS PROCEEDINGS 
21 
President J. G. Sanders: The report of the Committee on Nomen¬ 
clature is now in order. 
REPORT OF THE COMMITTEE ON NOMENCLATURE 
Your committee, in attacking the project delegated to it, has employed tactics 
which are possibly a little unusual. It has given its attention not only to the com¬ 
pilation of a list of names but to the more fundamental conceptions of name forma¬ 
tion and growth. Study has been given to suggestions submitted by various ento¬ 
mologists and editors, to dictionaries of the English language and to certain papers 
on Semantics. In fact an attempt has been made to review, in a preliminary way, 
the entire subject of the popular names of insects. 
The position has been taken that, first of all, names born naturally should be 
favored and that any operative procedure in bringing names into being should be 
resorted to only when such natural bom names are unavailable. It is further be¬ 
lieved that since these names are for popular usage the question of academic ento¬ 
mological exactitude is less vital than that of simplicity and utility. 
A preliminary examination has shown that no uniform system has heretofore been 
adopted in the consideration of the subject, inconsistencies of many kinds being at 
once evident. These were especially noted in the orthographic form of the com¬ 
pounds passed upon or suggested. While it is realized that rules for the form of 
compounds are scarcely traceable either in the ancient or modern periods of the 
English language it is felt that some plan of work should be prepared as a first step. 
The use of the hyphen appears to have developed at about Shakespeare’s time. 
In old English manuscripts such as those published by the Chaucer Society it is 
unknown. In the original edition of Shakespeare, on the other hand, the hyphen 
is excessively used, while Dr. Johnson used it in most common words in his dictionary 
and ran together unusual compounds such as ploughmonday. 
Modern English usage is extremely irregular. In fact even on the same page of the 
same work one may find variable usage. The tendency, however, seems to be to 
hyphenate with first element stress or with a syntactical group as the first element. 
The modem tendency of printers appears to be to omit hyphens if authors permit 
and we have seen papers in which even the periods were not printed. 
The fact that, during the past year, twenty or more members of this Association 
have given considerable thought and time to co-operative work on the project dele¬ 
gated to this committee, would indicate that the matter of common names is of 
general interest. 
1,000 names, compiled from practically all the available American publications 
on economic entomology, have passed through the hands of systematists for the 
purpose of bringing the scientific names up to date. The list has been widely circu¬ 
lated. Every member of the Associacion who has expressed either a desire or a 
willingness to see the list has been supplied with a copy. 
The present status of the list is what would logically be expected from a compila¬ 
tion; it represents, in an impartial way, the inconsistencies to be found in our ento¬ 
mological publications (past and present). 
To edit this list of 1,000 names would be a haphazard performance without the use 
of rules to serve as guides in the choice and construction of the common names. 
Such rules should be basic enough to satisfy not only the present need but to serve 
future committees in the same capacity. 
