I saw a bumper sticker that said "My other car is a T-rex!" This led me to think about common names for dinosaurs. No bumper-sticker would-be one-upper is going to want to say "My other car is a Giganotosaurus" or "My other car is a Carcharodontosaurus". But dinosaurs do not have common names.
And you rapidly run into a problem if you start trying to invent common names, because names like "Sharktooth" just plain don't sound right.
Here's why: With very few exceptions*, the names of animals in English do not carry any meaning other than the animal itself. That is, an animal's name (or its core, in the case of breeds and closely-related species) is a quintessential word, a collection of sounds assigned an arbitrary meaning. The name of Canis familiaris is dog, not "loyal hunting, herding, and guarding companion". cat, bear, eland, whale, skink, perch, ant, all of these point to the animal and none of them can be analyzed further.
So trying to assign Carcharodontosaurus the common name "Sharktooth" isn't going to work, because we don't expect animals to have composite, analytic names. You'd be better off just making up a word. New common names are thus, essentially, sniglets: gronko, fustle, biblock.
Then you've got king gronkos, big southern gronkos, and shark-toothed gronkos, and those are recognizably common names for animals.
Keep that in mind when you're writing your next spec-fic novel.
*I can think of only a few animal common names which are composite or analytic: rhinoceros, hippopotamus (and those assume excellent knowledge of Latinate roots). Whippoorwill, daddy-long-legs, roly-poly, probably a few more like that. Undoubtedly, you can find more. UPDATE: Jason points out the very good example fly.
Maybe pronghorn, if you think the animal's name is pronghorn and not pronghorn antelope.
It's possible, of course, that names adopted into English from native languages are composite or non-arbitrary in that native language (e.g. springbok), but they're single morphemes in English.
Posted by Greg at March 21, 2007 4:01 PM