If 90% of the population call them seagulls, and 99% of the population understand what you mean when you say “seagull”, then yes, they are actually called seagulls
It’s like what I say to bother botanists:
If half of the fruits with “berry” in their name don’t fit your definition of berry, you need a new definition
Pretty sure botanists are aware that the same word can have different meaning outside of their scientific field. The people actually bothered by this are pedants who read about it on the internet, not people who studied botany.
What if I told you that words can have different meanings in different contexts? Just because the same word can be used to refer to different things depending on whether its used in everyday or scientific speech doesn’t mean either usage is “wrong”.
Context specific definitions are the bane of my autistic existence. Figuring out context is a waste of brainpower that could be better used having anxiety over situations that aren’t going to happen.
/Completely serious, but not quite as strongly as worded here.
Annoy naturalists with these other animal names too: Jellyfish, crawfish, starfish, Killer Whale, Canadian Geese, and American Buffalo.
The buffalo thing pisses me off the most. Entire cultures are defined by that animal and it’s incredibly significant to the history of the prairies and the continent as a whole. So it seems to me pretty disrespectful to go to these people and go “um actually what you’ve been calling this animal for centuries is wrong actually because Linnaeus or whatever”
If you’re an ornithologist writing a scientific paper, you’d presumably be using a genus + species in Latin rather than any colloquial name anyway, while still acknowledging that they fall under the umbrella term “seagull” for most people. But I’m a descriptive linguist, rather than prescriptive, and that’s really what this meme is about (it’s not about seagulls)
Birds actually have scientific common names and it’s completely acceptable to refer to them with those names. They even have standardized bird abbreviations using those names, like Red-tailed Hawk is RTHA. They of course use the latin names too, and those have their own abbreviations (Buteo jamaicensis is BUTJAM) but the common names are handier.
