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 in explaining the strange scientific name he gave the San Benito sparrow:
There are so many places named in Lower California for [saints] that I concluded to dedicate this Sparrow impartially to the whole calendar of them,
thus the All Saint’s Sparrow, Passerculus sanctorum.
I understand, in part: Coues was mocking, as only he could, the explosion of “San” names American ornithologists were giving small 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.
Ideas? Or did the richer context of the joke vanish with its creator?
