In article ,
"Emrys Davies" writes:
| "JennyC" wrote in message
| ...
|
| Do you mean horse tail or mares tail ?
| There is difference...........
| http://www.sherriff-amenity.com/technical.asp?newsid=3
|
| My friend merely referred to it as Mare's Tail and our conversation
| centred on that almost indistructable weed which is the topic of this
| thread. A good point though.

Not really. That Web page is talking crap about the name, whether or
not it is sensible in other respects.

Mare's tail can refer to either Equisetum or Hippurus, perfectly
correctly. There is no confusion between the plants and never was,
outside the deluded minds of nomenclatural crusaders.

Some UK botanical dogmatists are trying to force the use of their pet
canonical names for plants, completely ignoring the fact that English
is an imprecise, context-dependent, language defined by its users.
This arose from the obviously erroneous belief that the public was
put off botany by the use of Latin names, so the campaign is to
invent English species names, force their adoption and claim that the
use of the established names that don't match botanical taxonomy are
wrong. Those religious fanatics need to be told to go and stuff
themselves.

If you want to refer to a species or genus, precisely, use the Latin
names. If you want to speak loosely, including when the context
makes the meaning clear, use English. If you can't remember one,
use the other :-) On this newsgroup, we flip between the two with
gay abandon, and it almost never causes any confusion.


Regards,
Nick Maclaren.