The tags that came with this particular plant identify it as Graptopetalum panaquayense, a spelling that, if you Google it, you'll find is only used by one company, Proven Winners. Everybody else calls it G. paraguayense, which makes more sense, because Paraguay is an actual place where one might find plants that one would then name after their place of discovery, and "Panaquay" is gibberish. Presumably someone, somewhere at Proven Winners, was reading someone's bad handwriting one day, and an "r" became an "n," and a "g" became a "q," and that one mistake was immortalized on thousands (millions?) of plastic tags and distributed throughout the world by Google.
I find the double-typo more interesting than the plant, alas..jpg)
Friday, March 13, 2009
Random plant event: Graptopetalum paraguayense flower
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3 comments:
I have often wondered about the incorrect spelling of plant names.
You'd think people would at least check the spelling of a name before putting it on a tag. OK, so I do check names obsessively every time I write them down anywhere, but especially for anything that goes to anyone outside my workplace.
We sell a lot of these.
We like to make up names whenever we can. And not just occasional typos, but making up entire new names. One of our more popular plants since we opened we had labeled Pachyphytum hassei. Hah! No such thing. For 6 years we had that name out there, and nobody caught it.
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