
Page 2 September 1977 No. 234 NEW YORK SHELL CLUB NOTES 
NAME THAT SHELL! 
Morris K. Jacobson 
(A talk delivered to the New York Shell Club June 12, 1977) 
. i ame of a shell, not the "common" 
Here I'm talking about the true n icatoaL, lethnteed eae 
or English name. Rather the scientific, 
11 zoologists all over the world, 
everybody has already dis- 
the irregularity of con- 
presumably the one name in use by a 
I won't go into why we need this name as 
cussed this: the ambiguity, the confusion, 
mon names etc. etc. 
It would seem to be the easiest job in the world: Find a shell 
which has never been described or named in print; go ahead and de- 
scribe it and give it a name. That's the way it should be, but it 
just isn't. It's a lot more complicated. There are many pitfalls, 
some obvious, others tricky. The most obvious ones are almost all 
the result of insufficient research which is usually caused by a 
deficient reference library. What are some of these pitfalls? 
Number one: How do you know the shell has never been named before? 
The literature in which shells have been named and described has 
been accumulating since 1758 and appears in many languages in all 
sorts of prominent and obscure publications located in all parts of 
the civilized world. So just saying, "Gee, I never saw this kind 
before!" does not mean that it is new to science. If, however, you 
did look in all possible sources, but overlooked the one you never 
knew existed, then you have created a synonym, a second later name 
and thus, under the law of priority (which states that the earlier 
name is the more valid one), a useless name. But it should be borne 
in mind that synonyms are not always total losses. How come? Sup- 
pose that in the future somebody finds that the earlier name, the 
one that reduced yours to a synonym, for some reason is actually not 
so good, then your synonym, which has been lingering in limbo, if it 
is the earliest synonym, now takes on the robes of validity and you 
can Shine in its reflected glory. That's reason number one. 
Now, reason number two: Suppose you make up a nice euphonious name 
and the species really is new, but it turns out that those very 
words and combinations of letters have already been used before by 
someone describing an entirely different species. In this way you 
have given birth to a homonym, words that look and sound alike but 
refer to different objects. And although a synonym can be revived, 
a homonym never. It is born dead, ‘totgeboren,’ it never had life. 
Thus, even if the earlier name, the one that sounded just like yours 
and made yours a homonym, turns out to be invalid or is put into an- 
other genus, and even though your homonym is earlier than any re- 
Be tas rok i cannot take its place. Let's stop for 
see what ha i 
= ypy ge ay peaaallh ppens to your name when it is discovered to 
If your colleagues are polite, and if you're sti 
discovery is made, they should notify elt and eve phe Pande 
eae ao oi homonym with a non-homonym. Of course, if the original 
saken Md eau Some synonyms along with it, then any one of these 
Lb pata ie place. aap your colleague have to notify you that you've 
: ed a homonym? Not necessarily, and in the past some real 
meanies often did not. The worst of these was one Embrik Strand, 
who made it his life's work to replace homonyms or otherwise invalid 
