You are walking down a forest path close to where you live when something out of the corner of your eye catches your attention. A brightly coloured figure growing on the ground or perhaps out of a fallen log, invites you to come closer. You answer the call, removing some forest debris so you can get a closer look. There lies a mushroom you have not seen before, you do not know its name, but you contemplate them as you brainstorm your options. You write a little description of its shape, its colour, where it is growing, its smell, whether it has gills, pores, or something else. This description will be useful, maybe you can ask one of your parents if they know what you found, you could go see if there is a field guide at your local library, search the description online, find a university with a mycology department, maybe a local pharmacist or apothecary knows it, perhaps there is a chapter of a mycological society in your hometown, you could also return the next day and try to come up with a name of your own. Whichever option you end up choosing will influence what you determine is the name of the fungi you found. With a name you may know if it is edible, poisonous, if it tastes well, perhaps it has a positive medical effect. You will know where and when it grows if it prefers to be associated with some trees over others. In other words, a name allows you to form a relationship with the fungi, regardless of if it is a common name or a scientific name.

     Naturally these two categories of names differ from one another, they represent different ways of knowing. In a way, both are forms of specialized knowledge. Scientific names are in Latin because during the time of Carl Linnaeus, the “father” of modern taxonomy, some aca-demic work was written in Latin. Linnaeus proposed the binomial nomenclature that is still in use where a scientific name is broken into the genus (always capitalized) and the species (never capitalized). This means scientific names are part of a historic process that began in the XVIII century and whose tradition is carried to this day. At present, for a scientific name to be recognized it must be submitted and recognized by the Nomenclature Committee for Fungi¹ and fol-low the international code of nomenclature for algae, fungi, and plants². The goal of scientific names, as outlined by the code, is to aim “at the provision of a stable method of naming taxo-nomic groups, avoiding and rejecting the use of names that may cause error or ambiguity or throw science into confusion.” In other words, scientific names exist for the scientific commu-nity’s sake. As such, so called common (sometimes called vulgar, something I do not condone) names have existed alongside scientific names, some even predating the formalization of tax-onomy. Henceforth, there are no committees or codes that need recognize the existence of a common name.

     The characteristics of the common name make it more fluid, less restricted and less sus-ceptible to revisions. One only needs to look at species fungorum³ to see how mycological tax-onomy has undergone many updates to the genera and names. This is in part because all species recognized by Mycology have a scientific name, something that is not the case for common names. One possibility for this is the nature of the relationship to fungi. The ultimate objective of taxonomy is to itemize as many living and extinct species found on our planet Earth. This means rare fungi get names and then sit for years, untouched, in a university’s herbarium. Un-like scientific names, common names disappear if they go unused and unrecorded. They indi-cate a different kind of relationship to fungi; one whose goal is not only to make a list but is much harder to pin-point. Just like common names are fluid, they also encompass a multitude of relationships to fungi that can be historical, political, practical, nurturing, intimate.

     So, what’s in a name? asks Juliet, letting Romeo know that he could have any name and still be who she is in love with. In the end, of course, it is their names that seal their tragic fates. Seen within this context, the phrase highlights Juliet’s naiveté at thinking their names did not matter. This suggests that there was something intrinsic to both characters that was reflected in their names which points to an internal source of meaning for them. If one takes the quote literally, however, it shows that names can be external to what they name. Romeo is not defined by his family name in the eyes of Juliet, her definition of him is not just as a Montague. Shake-speare thus points to two potential sources for names, those coming from within and those from without. There probably are more ways of abstracting names, for now let us consider this two and how they can apply to both scientific and common Fungi names.

     Let us take Amanita virosa. As a scientific name it tells us that the specimen should have white spores/gills, an annulus present, volva at the bottom of the stipe, all Amanita character-istics. The name Amanita itself coming probably from either a mountain in Cilicia or an ancient city between Epirus or southern Illyria, nobody remembers with certainty which one. The genus as is used today was defined by Persoon in 1797. Virosa tells us we should expect it to be slimy or sticky. Contrast this with one of its common names in English, the Destroying Angel. A name that immediately conjures the idea that it should not be eaten without needing more than two-hundred years of context and knowledge of a dead language. The scientific name defines the fungi both from what it looks like (sticky/slimy) and from without (given that the genus name does not describe the fungi itself). The common name also describes the fungi from within by alluding to its deadly properties, and from without by invoking Judaeo-Christian tradition. The more context and names we know for any given fungi, the more our understanding of the dif-ferent histories and relationships people have had throughout history and geography. It is not as simple as one name being more important than the other, and that is what this project is about. Expanding and promoting knowledge about Fungi.