Vocabulary from the Primate World

Ever since the embarrassing experience of not knowing the word guignon (a kind of Old World monkey) at a local spelling bee, I have become focused on learning, and spelling correctly, the names of animals/plants. I suppose this is an Adamic reaction to life (see Gen. 2:19) but it has unleashed in me a passion for understanding what things are called that is similar to that which I felt for learning the Bible about 35 years ago. So, I decided to begin somewhere, and I got out a few books on primates. As I began to work through pictures and characteristics which are listed in books and online sources, I began to learn a lot of things. This essay will show you how the entire natural world is starting to open to me as a result of one missed spelling word.

Looking at the Primates

When I was a child I not only spoke and reasoned as a child but I learned the then-current Linnean classification of living things: Kingdom, Phylum, Class, Order, Family, Genus, Species. I only learned recently that Linneaus himself had a five-fold classification, and so my 1950s-1960s knowledge was based on scientific work since the 18th century. But now, as I turned to the world of living things, rather than of texts or abstract ideas, I realized that taxonomy not only has become much more refined but is, in fact, only an "educated guess" at a certain time of our knowledge. For example, we now not only have orders and families, but we have about six or so categories in addition: Suborders and Infraorders and Parvorders and Superfamilies and Subfamilies, etc. Each one of these is distinguished by its own particular Latinate ending, and so if you are in an "oidea," you know you are in a superfamily, a "dae" (pronounced either DEE or DAY--they should agree on this) tells you you are in a family, a "nae" is indicative of a subfamily, and the two word Latinate description, beginning with a capitalized word, is the genus and species. We also have subspecies, which is indicated by a third word in lower case. Thus the Guinea Baboon is the Papio hamadryas papio.

But just as Charles Darwin posited a struggle for existence among living things, so there seems to be a struggle for taxonomical independence among various living creatures. What I mean by this is that things that once were subspecies normally "graduate" to species in the same manner as an Assistant Professor becomes an Associate Professor. Thus, at any time, taxonomists might disagree as to what is a species or a subspecies. As a result of this, the books I read on primates, one dating from 1980 and one from 1996, differed in the number of species of Primates identified. For example, the Time Life guide to Primates (1980) says: "At once a problem of definition arises, because the order primates embraces some 200 living species" (p. 10). But the 1996 book, The Pictorial Guide to the Living Primates, speaks of the "250 species" of primates (p. 1). But then, if you do some online research, you see that the numbers of primate species now tops 400. Thus, primatology is seemingly a growth industry. We hear all the time about species depletion and destruction of habitat by human encroachment, which I don't deny, but it seems on the other hand, that we are discovering new species each month. It appears, to quote the Bible, that the fields are white for harvest but that the number of laborers in the field are few. Just as in the filed of gemology is exploding because we are finding and naming all sorts of new rocks, minerals and gems, so it seems that the world of primate and other study is also exploding.

Vocabulary in the Primate World

So, as I began to wander in the world of the primates, I not only discovered lots of interesting pictures and learned tons of interesting things about classification and habitats, but I realized that the principal way to learn "all the words of the world," so to speak, was patiently to work through the Linnean classification system. This doesn't mean that I have to learn all 3000 or more species of Bromeliads, for example, but it does mean that we have to learn the way the world is classified and described in quite some detail. But while I am overjoyed to be adding insights about behavior of primates to my mind, it may spell the death of me as a speller. Let me close this essay by illustrating what I mean by that.

When discussing the "Collared Titi" or "Widow Monkey" (Callicebus torquatus), which is of the Primate Order, the Haplorrhini Suborder, the Simiiformers Infraorder (though some taxonomists drop or ignore the Simiiformes), the Platyrrhini Parvorder, the Cebidae family and the Callicebinae subfamily (don't worry, this is good for you), the author, Noel Rowe, says: "in July the fruit of the ungurahui palm (Jessenia polycarpa) is the single most important food item" (p. 92). We learn elsewhere that the Jessenia polycarpa is synonymous with Oenocarpus bataua. Ok, so far so bad.

The Ungurahui Palm

I have decided in the last few years that when I don't understand something that I read, then I stop and track it down until I understand it. This can lead to really slow reading, but it is the way I like to do things now. So, I decided to look up ungurahui. Not in any dictionary. The Net had some good things, however. I found myself on the "palm" page, which listed all 189 genera of palm trees in the world. I realized that I really didn't want to explore them all at this point, so I quickly found another source that gave a picture of ungurahui palm fruits. I learned that the "thin, oily mesocarp has a chocolate-like taste and is very popular." It is used in beverages, such as "chapo" (again, a word not in any dictionary I found), popsicles and ice cream. You can use the wood of the Oenocarpus bataua for floors and other construction needs.

Then, I found this web page which describes the life of the Matses Indians of the Rio Galvez in the Amazon Rainforest. The site has a wonderful picture of Matses Indian "facial ornamentation." Men and women have different ornamentation. The author says that formerly the men had perforations in their upper lips in which they placed spines from the ungurahui palm. Then, they applied a bright red dye (achiote) obtained from the seeds of the annatto tree (Bixa orellana) to the face and body.

Well, I wasn't so interested at this point in the lives of the Matses, but I was taken by the varied use of the ungurahui palm. Thankfully, the word achiote is in the OED and the Unabridged and is defined: "the seed of the annatto tree." But when you look up the definition in the OED you have, "A native name for the seeds of the Arnotto or Arnatto (Bixa orellana), and the red coloring matter obtained from their pulp."

Now I hope you see the problem. We come to the annotto tree, and we can spell it at least eight ways. The Century gives us another few spellings of it. Indeed, here are the spellings listed in the Unabridged: "annatto, anato, anatto, anatta, arnatta, arnatto, arnotta, arnotto." Really, really helpful. Fortunately since the Collegiate is such a limited dictionary it has no entry for achiote, which the OED also spells achote, but the Collegiate does list annatto. Thus, in order to be ready for my spelling competition this summer, I need to forget achiotes and remember the "annatto" spelling for this tree. It is almost too much to bear... Why am I doing these bees anyway?

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