Re: AIS: HIST: REF: Early Checklists

It would be just as valid for me to refer to inner and
outer tepalsegs as S or F. But if I started using OT
and IT I don't think anyone would lap it up. I am not
disputing that certain terminolgy is useful but by
abbreviating unnecessarily we will leave a few people
behind. I am for a kinder gentler rhetoric that
doesn't present a snobbish elitism but tries to meet a
new reader halfway.
TWOI is not a particularly common abbreviation even on
this list. But The World of Iris was not the
originater of our present terms for dwarf, etc. These
all have evolved. The World... just recorded where the
thinking was at the time. I find abrreviations
annoying because I usually can think of several things
they could stand for even in the context of most
usages. Of course the federal bureaucrasy loves these
things and unlike a scientific paper where the
abbreviation is always defined before it is repeated
throughout, we get a ridiculous alphabet soups that
only attests to our laziness.

--- ChatOWhitehall@aol.com wrote:

> In a message dated 8/1/2007 3:54:23 PM Eastern
> Daylight Time,  
> rpries@sbcglobal.net writes:
> 
> . Of  course we compound this by then abbreviating
> the jargon; ergo  
> standards,
> falls, 
> 
> 
> Nah. We are not responsible for that one. 
>  
> I've documented an instance of that particular  Iris
> terminology in the 
> seventeenth century. An English author  remarked
> upon the use of just those terms 
> by a French nurseryman.
>  
> The stuff that made me crazy in the beginning was
> things like how Standard  
> Dwarf Bearded Irises were not classed as Dwarf
> Irises, and how AIS had the  
> unvarnished effrontery in TWOI to apply its bearded
> cultivar size  
> classifications to the bearded Iris species. 
>  
> And of course, all that fundamentally unsatisfying
> balderdash in the  
> literature, meaning Mathew and the whole lot of the
> wise men, about the  germanica 
> complex, so called. I figured if someone as
> botanically dumb as I ---I  was 
> trained as an art historian, you understand---could
> recognize  palpable nonsense 
> on the hoof, then it was likely to be pretty 
> egregious nonsense. 
>  
> But all that said, I think any specialized field,
> including a floral  
> society, must have a specialized vocabulary,
> possibly even a large one, to  meet the 
> group's innate need for precise communication, and I
> think that is  entirely 
> okay.
>  
> I really don't think people get scared off things
> they are interested  in by 
> new words or concepts. I think they lap them up. 
>  
> Anner Whitehead
> Richmond VA USA 
>  
> 
> 
> 
> ************************************** Get a sneak
> peek of the all-new AOL at 
> http://discover.aol.com/memed/aolcom30tour
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>
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