Have a look at this this example: monkfish, sea devil, angler,
belly-fish, headfish, sea monk, fishing frog and goosefish all refer to
the same fish. Confusing, right?
Using latin in classification, the fish is uniquely identified as:
Kingdom: Animalia
Phylum: Chordata
Class: Actinopterygii
Order: Lophiiformes
Family: Lophiidae
Genus: Lophius
As you can see from the examples above, not everyone can understand what
particular specimens are being referred to by using "nicknames" or
"monikers" in a particular language. The latter vary not only from
language to language, but even from region to region. Thus we inject too
much confusion into the discussion when we forgo using scientific names
of plants in favor of their nicknames. In fact, even within the same
region a specimen may well have more than one nickname attributed to it.
Or in some cases, none exists at all for a given specimen. Worse yet,
two specimens quite unrelated may share the exact same nickname!
It was to combat confusion that Swedish naturalist Carolus (Carl)
Linnaeus (1707-1778) developed what is known as the binomial system for
taxonomy -- in other works, the use of scientific names for plants.
"Binomial" means that two words are used for classification purposes,
and those two words are in Latin (or Latinized, at least). You may
remember from History class that Latin was once the universal language
of Western scholars. And it is that very universality that is still
relied upon to bring some clarity to the business of plant
classification, in the form of scientific names for plants. So if you
plug Glechoma hederacea, for instance, into the Google search engine, by
about the fourth page of results you'll see that some of the entries
are in languages other than English. That's universality for you, and
that's the beauty of the scientific names of plants.