Nomenclature is the scientific language of Taxonomy, and you already know everything about it

Nomenclature and Taxonomy are often considered boring topics of research, whereas even some researchers consider Nomenclature not to be a scientific discipline at all. Others believe that Taxonomy needs a major image change to attract interest from modern scientific audiences. In this contribution, I rebrand Nomenclature and Taxonomy as parts of the same scientific discipline, following Schneider’s (2009) scheme. Furthermore, I focus on the role of taxonomists in promoting the importance of nomenclature and taxonomy to younger scientific audiences and teaching these techniques in a way that supports the entire discipline. My own experience with Nomenclature and Taxonomy teaching is that it usually focuses on the most complicated and confusing exceptions where the Code did not work, instead of focusing on teaching the main part of the discipline that does work well. Even in those cases, teachers present it with excessive terminology and complex terms that may discourage the student or young researcher. Here, I propose a new, simple method for teaching the key concepts of nomenclature and taxonomy—availability, validity, homonymy, synonymy, coordination, and spelling—using analogies that people are familiar with their daily lives: how a computer archives its files. With this analogy, the teacher can deliver the main concepts of nomenclature and taxonomy in a few minutes.