what’s in a name

what is in a name

“I love the French names for butterflies, compared to which many of the English names are a little unimaginative; for example the English orange tip is simply descriptive, while the French l’aurore-the dawn-is rather more poetic. What do we call speckled butterfly that lives in the wood? The speckled wood, of course, while to French it is le Tircis, named after a shepherd in a seventeenth-century fable by Jean de la Fontaine.”-Dave Goulson

note: taken from A Buzz in theMeadow, The Natural History of a French Farm by Dave Goulson