Leading article | Your chance to vote in the great debate

In favour of the wistaria spelling (Richard Dixon)

My gardening style is like my hair: quasi-wild, letting nature take its course, the occasional blade allowing light to penetrate the thicket. By contrast, my attitude to the use of English in the world's greatest newspaper is more short- back-and-sides: ruthlessly prune anything unfruitful or unnecessary.

So I find myself in a militant minority, maybe of one, against the combined forces of James Harding, Editor of The Times, and the global plant establishment that oversees the International Code of Botanical Nomenclature (ICBN). MPs are rightly in trouble over expenses wrongly claimed for having their rampant climbing shrub hacked back. I am a hack at odds with the boss because I say it should be spelt wistaria, as promoted by the bible that I write and edit, The Times Style Guide, and not wisteria.

Passions in our linguistic potting shed have run high. Regrettably, I have been reduced to a shouting match with one of my dearest friends here; more widely, I suspect I have been the object of some ridicule. It is the pedant's/smart arse's burden. James, mighty champion of the Spelling Bee, has invited me to explain why I am going down fighting as he seeks to impose his backing for an official spelling mistake almost as old as The Times.

Thomas Nuttall, an eminent English botanist, described the North American flora in the early 19th century. He commemorated the esteemed doctor, scientist and philosopher, Caspar Wistar (not Wister), by revising to Wisteria (not Wistaria) what Linnaeus had called Glycine frutescens 65 years earlier. My analysis: brilliant expert advances both knowledge and vowel disorder, a not unknown phenomenon, as I, one who daily reads the words of many brilliant people for The Times, can attest.

The plant establishment (aka the raffia) compounds this suffix error, unconvincingly explained by Nuttall as being more euphonious, by insisting that once a genus name is accepted it is set in stone; thus, an apparent boo-boo or typo is put on a par with the Ten Commandments. Nuttall was possibly grief-stricken when he published Genera of North American Plants in July 1818, six months after Wistar died.

Yet the ICBN rules that names can be changed “for the correction of typographical or orthographical errors”. So wisteria is not such a blunder? It allowed Globba brachycarpa to be changed to Globba trachycarpa. Yes, you can jump if the raffia says jump: wistaria (-eria) was once in the Leguminosae family. Now many taxonomists say that is a load of peas and opt for Fabaceae, old bean.

Wistaria is not the only official cock-up. For example, what the raffia calls Eschscholzia (the California poppy) is named after a Johann Eschscholtz, but Adelbert von Chamisso, who first recorded it in 1820, could not spell his own friend's name and left out the “t”.

Let's end this illiterate nonsense. Not least, let us bestow more honour on Caspar, after whom the Wistar (not -er) Institute, the US's first independent biomedical research outfit, is named. Let's weed out institutional stupidity. We are doing it with MPs' expenses; why not for a gorgeous harbinger of early summer joy?

Richard Dixon, PhD (albeit zoology), is chief revise editor of The Times

In favour of the wisteria spelling (Philip Howard)

Some, including my friend and chief revise editor, Richard Dixon (see above), spell wistaria. Others, including my friend and Editor James Harding, spell wisteria. What are gardeners and scribblers to do about this Gordian knot?

Alexander solved the original Gordian knot by cutting it with his sword. That is the Macedonian way, rooting out the lawn for Astroturf, and blasting the jungle of English spelling by a phonological revolution. But the English way to spell (and garden) is by careful pruning and weeding. Weeds are only plants that nobody has yet found a use for.

English spelling is a jungle because of its many sources, not just Teutonic/Romance, but Runic, Nordic, Saxon, Jewish, Hindi, Japanese and all the other virtual- orthographies from the old Empire's pink corners. And the spellings are alphabetical archaeology. They show the roots of the words so that (s)he who runes may read. Plants are especially tricky, because they are often eponyms of their discoverers or namers, who had the bad luck to be in some foreign garden. So take Weigela, the pretty, honeysucklish shrub with red, pink or white flowers. It is named after C.E. Weigel, (1748-1831), a German physician. Fine and dandy: except that it is also “correctly” spelt Weigelia by the professionals.

Plants are particularly likely to be eponyms, being named after their discoverer or recorder. Sometimes the nomenclators get it right. Gardenia is properly named for the 19th-century Scottish-American physician, Alexander Garden. In 1763 Linnaeus named zinnia for J.G. Zinn, a German botanist. But haste and ignorance often get the spelling wrong. Camellia is named for Sgr Kamel, a Moravian Jesuit who described the botany of the island of Luzon in the Philippines. And to show that all language, not just spelling, is in a continual state of chasssis, it was originally pronounced camel-ia, as though it was related to humpy quadrupeds. The Oxford English Dictionarystates, grumpily, “often mispronounced as cameellia”. Well, we have changed that.

Or pluck a flower of eschscholtzia, the California poppy, blazing today yellow and saffron in every English herbaceous border worth its compost. This was named in honour of Baron J.F. von Eschscholtz, a German on the Romanzoff exploring expedition of 1821. Being Russians, they spelt his name wrong. The “t” is optional, and some anti-pedants replace the “z” with an “s”.

Wistaria (wisteria) is one such another eponym. As Richard Dixon says, wistaria is eponymically and etymologically correct. But to pronounce it as it looks to rhyme with “this aria” or “this area” sounds affected. So let the original typo rule. It is the job of great revise editors to weed out kakographical weeds; it is the job of the skilful gardener to recognise that growth is essential. And to spell words nearer to the way that they are generally pronounced is a virtue. In this case, the error is established. Let wisteria bloom, without hysteria from our Spelling Bee.

Philip Howard, MA, Oxon (Literae Humaniores, not botany) is a leader writer on The Times.

More word games at www.timesspellingbee.co.uk

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