trebornosnibor:@elodieunderglass What irks me about this post is that with some of these, whoever wa
trebornosnibor:@elodieunderglass What irks me about this post is that with some of these, whoever was assigning names to all the different subtypes of some bird did decide “let’s call this one the SATANIC nightjar” or “PERPLEXING scrubwren” or “MONOTONOUS lark”, and in those cases there are questions to be asked about what naturalists or scientists were thinking, exactly. But some of them – loons, bustards, swallows, smews, probably shags – were being called that, just by the people who came into contact with them, before technical species classification was a thing. All ornithologists did was NOT discard commonly used names which sounded funny.–“Tit” is an interesting case, though. My dictionary says its use for birds dates to ~1700, and is derived from “titmouse”. “Titmouse”, interestingly, dates to the 14th century, and comes from [particle meaning small]+[Old English word for titmouse]. HOWEVER, the dictionary definition of “titmouse” says they are NORTH AMERICAN.My theory is that when naturalists ~1700 decided that the birds they’d been calling titmice in Europe and North America were not all the same species, they decided for whatever reason that the North American birds got to keep the name. Then, they decided the best thing to call the European formerly-titmice was… tits.The other usage of “tit” goes back to, like, the 12th century. -- source link