Misspellings

Guido.J.Braem@bio.uni-giessen.de
Wed, 1 May 1996 20:43:18 +0000

> Wait a second Jan, all is not lost, there's still the new CP genus
> "Broncchinia" from the growlist you can add to your list...

Now, Broncchinia is difficult to grow. You must add 1 million
international units of Streptomycin per growth receptacle and day.

Ok, Serious now.

There are a lot of misspellings in the literature. Most result from
articles written by amateurs or semi-professionals but some also
result from experienced taxonomists. It should not happen, but it
does! Anyone writing books knows that you can proof read 37 times and
that after that, there will still be mistakes.
And if you compare your plant names with
so-called authoritative sources such as the IK (Index Kewensis), you
will find that there are a lot of mispellings there too. (I alone
have sent about 300-400 correction messaged to their editor, and I
don't work with it every day.)

Now to the point. There are two ways of looking at this problem.
The easy way is just to forget about these misspellings. Don't list them.
The second way, is, I think, the better one. List them but indicate
clearly that it is a 'lapsus lingua' (I hope I got that correctly
spelled).
However, for each synonym and that includes those misspellings, the
complete reference should be given.

Guido J. Braem