The danger of colloquialisms

Carl Zimmer posted an interesting article last night about historical biogeography, and the clues we can get about continental drift (amongst other things,) from the distribution of fauna. Generally smaller, less mobile, and more environmentally picky creatures are the most use, since they don’t tend to get around by other means, and this piece writes about one that fits the bill; it’s a tiny harvestman (an ancient order of arachnids). Unfortunately, because Carl’s used a colloquial name to refer to it, a lot of confusion has ensued; look at the comments if you want a taste.

The problem is that the term he used – “daddy longlegs” – is used colloquially to refer to three different types of creatures in various parts of the world, and if the comments are anything to go by he has a lot of readers from places that use it differently to him. Speaking as a Brit, a daddy longlegs is a crane-fly, which (until I remembered that it can also refer to a harvestman,) was a little confusing; since crane-flies are not particularly small, or particularly choosy about their environment, and they can fly so the point about them not not moving around much under their own power is somewhat lost, as well. It could have been worse, though; if I was someone who’d immediately thought of the daddy-longlegs spider, I might not have even realised something was amiss, and just gone away from the article with the wrong idea entirely; not a desirable outcome.

Now, I’m not having a go at Carl here, he’s an excellent writer, and he does an awful lot to present complex science in a way the layman (including me) can understand – and be enthused by. And, in fact, he does give the taxonomic classification of the harvestman he’s talking about, so the scientifically literate won’t be misled. My point (insofar as I can be said to have one) is that while using a colloquial name like this might make the writing, and therefore the science, more accessible, we should be extremely careful to bear in mind that while they might seem friendly, colloquialisms are also notoriously ill-defined and prone to misinterpretation. It would be a real shame if, in order to make science accessible to the general public, we also had to make it useless to them by sacrificing the very precision and clarity that makes it so powerful.

Edit: Zooillogix reports the same research, and also neglects to clarify what type of daddy longlegs the mite harvestman is related to.

Edit 2: Richard Dawkins and Bug Girl have also linked to Zimmer’s original, restating the ambiguous term without clarification. This is particularly careless from Dawkins, who’s British, and so, presumably, thinks of daddy longlegs as crane-flies himself.

Edit 3: This is the last one, I swear. The comments on Zooillogix post have sort of made my point for me; the images in the New York Times version of Zimmer’s article that Zooillogix link are not, in fact, of the Harvestman at all, they’re of the Daddy Longlegs Spider, which is a closer relative than the crane fly, but still not close enough. When your language is ambiguous enough that the photo researchers of your own publication are confused, there must be something wrong.