A gardener friend of ours used to object to calling a plant by its Latin name. She heard it as pretense and obfuscation. But after the sage incident, she conceded that there was some point to it.

SKEPTICISM IS A VIRTUE: That’s the slogan under which Brill’s Content, the media-watchdog magazine, wages war on bias, cant, and sloppiness in the press. The magazine can be tough on journalists whom ...

For two years in the late 1970s I followed in the footsteps of Carl Linnaeus: I toiled in the field of taxonomy. The small corner of nature's jigsaw puzzle that I tackled was a group of marine sponges ...

You say tomato, I say Lycopersicon esculentum. You say potato, I say Solanum tuberosum. But Carl Linnaeus was the real plant buff. Often called the father of classification, Swedish naturalist ...