Like most birders, I have on occasion felt frustrated with a bird’s nomenclature. And as an English teacher and birder, I would like to nominate a name for alteration. A name that doesn’t fit the subject, or that creates confusion about the topic under discussion, is a name to be altered. Before that, they lacked any such term thagomizer was a tool adopted out of necessity.īut recognizing this necessity comes with a corollary: that the test of a name’s value, like that of any tool, is its usefulness.
For nearly 35 years, they have been able to refer to the business end of a stegosaurus’s tail as its thagomizer with reasonable certainty that the audience will understand what they’re describing. While the term thagomizer was intended to produce laughter, paleontologists quickly realized that Larson had produced something of practical value. after the late Thag Simmons.”Īs Cornell ornithologist Kevin McGowan once put it, “If we don’t know the name of it, it’s invisible.” The distinctive array of spikes at the end of the stegosaurus’s tail was certainly visible to any observer, but until 1982, it was nameless, and if not for poor Thag Simmons, it would likely have remained so.
#I guess you could call me the late bird ary llarson full
Those of you familiar with Gary Larson’s classic cartoon The Far Side may remember the panel in which he depicted a room full of cavemen, one of whom stood beside a drawing of a stegosaurus, pointing at the tail spikes and announcing, “Now this end is called the thagomizer.
But back in 1982, Thag gave his non-existent life to provide us with a reminder: names matter.
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