Re: AIS: HIST: REF: Early Checklists

You know I was new to irises in 1992, and I don't remember having any difficulty understanding what "standards" or "falls" were or getting acclimated to any of the particular jargon used by the AIS and irisarians, nor do I think is is or was elitist.
Every group has its particular vocabulary, and persons new tot he group learn the words and by doing so feel a part of the group. I might have felt left out if there were a secret handshake that I didn't know about... but wait, if it were a secret how would I know about it? 

John

On Aug 1, 2007, at 1:57 PM, Robt R Pries wrote:


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




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