![\"\"](\"http:\/\/history.amedd.army.mil\/booksdocs\/spanam\/gillet3\/pic15.jpg\")
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There’s not much worse than a private joke a hundred years after everyone who would get it is dead.<\/p>\n
Elliott Coues, whose birthday we mark today, committed a doozy\u00a0in explaining the strange scientific name he gave the\u00a0San Benito sparrow<\/strong>:<\/p>\n There are so many places named in Lower California for [saints] that I concluded to\u00a0dedicate this Sparrow impartially to the whole calendar of them,<\/p><\/blockquote>\n thus the All Saint’s Sparrow, Passerculus sanctorum.<\/em><\/p>\n I understand, in part: Coues was mocking, as only he could, the explosion of “San” names American ornithologists were giving\u00a0small populations of Mexican sparrows, San Ignacio and San Lucas and San Benito. What I can’t figure out is whether a precise circumstance or, more likely, a precise individual called forth the Couesian wit.<\/p>\n Ideas? Or did the richer context of the joke vanish with its creator?<\/p>\n <\/p>\n","protected":false},"excerpt":{"rendered":" There’s not much worse than a private joke a hundred years after everyone who would get it is dead. Elliott Coues, whose birthday we mark today, committed a doozy\u00a0in explaining the strange scientific name he gave the\u00a0San Benito sparrow: There are so many places named in Lower California for [saints] that I concluded to\u00a0dedicate this … <\/p>\n