It matters no more to me than it does to the birds themselves what we call the warblers of the genus Myioborus. Names, after all, don’t signify in the same way as other words. Call these tropical flitters redstarts or whitestarts or falsestarts: each of those names is just as “good” and just as “bad” as the others.
Thus, the AOU check-list committee’s judgment on Proposal 2016-A-2 can go with equal appropriateness either way, retaining the traditional name “redstart” or adopting the neologism “whitestart.” It’s hard to get terribly exercised about onomastic housekeeping like this.
But what does have my dander just the slightest bit up is the argument presented in the Proposal to make the change. It seems to go like this: the outer rectrices in Myioborus are white, not red; and
“start” of course is the modern English reflex of Middle English stert, Old English steort, tail of an animal.
Ergo, the vernacular name applied to Myioborus, with their flashy white tails, is a “misappropriation” that would “perpetuate ignorance.”
That’s not true at all (“of course”). “Start” hasn’t meant “tail” in English for more than six hundred years; if you don’t believe me, ask any other native speaker. The bird name “redstart” has been etymologically opaque for just as long. In other words, “redstart” doesn’t mean “red-tail” to any English-speaker; it refers, depending on which continent you spend most of your time on, to either a chunky chat or an active wood warbler.
The Myioborus warblers are nothing if not active (whether they are wood warblers or not is a question for another day). Only naive pedantry can claim that their white tails disqualify them from redstartness.
