Auct. non Ipse

Unraveled Latin mystery of the day:

auct. non.

In Latin, auctoris (singular) or auctorum (plural) means 'author.'  The above phrase is an abbreviation for auctorum non, which means 'of authors [but] not...'  It is used for misapplied names, in cases where you specifically want to point out that this name is NOT the one published by, say, Linnaeus.  Usually, it comes in handy when a subsequent author happened to publish a taxon using the same name as something that had been used before, and you're worried that whoever is reading your notes afterward might get confused.

I think it's interesting that you can keep track of all of these things, and that it's even important to do so.  I do wish, however, that we were approaching the age where all of this information would be more well organized and easily accessible.  I love living in this fast-paced computer age, where there is such a drive to realize exactly how something could be improved, and then to succeed in making that happen.  Gmail is my favorite poster child of this phenomenon.  Unfortunately, until or unless some really innovative and fired-up people start in on our botanical database problems, I'm not too optimistic about getting drastic improvements in our nomenclatural world.  Yeah, GPI (API & LAPI) are on the right track, and yes, botanicus.org and biodiversitylibrary.org are too, and IPNI and the Harvard University Herbarium databases are lifesavers.  But the point is - there's room for a lot of improvement.  We need more collaboration, more drastic combination of resources and output, and some amazing minds to get it all integrated beyond our wildest dreams.

Oh well.  In the meantime, this small brain will go on trying to interpret her small world of botanists' atrocious handwriting, and slowly decoding all that lovely old Latin.  With the gentleness of a butcher.

I think these big herbarium windows give me a flightier imagination than usual.