Animals Names: a Capital idea?

In introducing the new edition of Clinton Keeling’s book, Where the Lion Trod, the editor made the point that Clin had a set of rules on names and abbreviations that he followed and expected everybody else to do so too: ‘These include starting all animal names with a capital letter’. This rule was not just for the common name of a species or the scientific name of a formal group but everything. I just pulled these out of the book at random: Monkeys, Antelopes, Opossums, Marmosets, Doves, Macaws. Modern usage would be: monkeys, antelopes, opossums, marmosets, doves, macaws.

But where did Clin get the idea that such names should be capitalised. Well, he was the complete autodidact and read anything on animals that he could get hold of in his early years. The style he acquired and kept for life was actually the one used by Proceedings of the Zoological Society of London in the 19th and early 20th centuries. Thus we have Oldfield Thomas describing in 1911 the results of the Duke of Bedford’s Exploration by Malcolm Playfair Anderson and his colleagues:

He has been especially fortunate in discovering novelties among the Shews and Voles, while the peculiar little Insectivores…

I do not know when the change to modern usage occurred in that Journal (now Journal of Zoology) but anybody in the Zoo Library could quickly find out.

I once spent a fascinating afternoon with typographic designers while on the editorial board of a journal undergoing a revamp. Because capitals stop the eye from moving freely down the page they are an impediment to speed reading. The message was to keep capitals to a minimum. However, some book and journals styles take that too far and use lower case letters for names of species, arctic fox instead of Arctic Fox. Such usage can cause confusion; common toad can be a toad that is common or a Common Toad. When faced with such house rules the sub-editor can usually be made to change them by pointing out that old-saw of the bird-watcher being asked to identify the birds in a beginner’s telescope. ‘You, madam, have a pair of Great Tits’ can have an entirely different meaning from ‘You, madam, have a pair of great tits’.