Fly Times Issue 48, April 2012 - North American Dipterists Society

30
HISTORICAL DIPTEROLOGY
Dipterophilologicalities 1 . First Instar
Neal L. Evenhuis
J. Linsley Center for Research in Entomology, Bishop Museum, 1525 Bernice Street,
Honolulu, Hawaii 96817-2704, USA; email: NealE@bishopmuseum.org
This is the first in a series of notes on names given to genera and species in Diptera. Some may be
biographical in nature and possibly on the longish-side; others may be as short as the name in question.
We often see a scientific name in a paper but do not think much past what it is as a species or a genus.
This series will hopefully provide some interesting tidbits of information and maybe a bit of background
to the people and places who are/were famous or maybe little-known but in any case for whom or what
an author saw fit to honor with a Diptera taxon name.
Thanks to the Systema Dipterorum database (www.diptera.org) for some of the statistical data used in
the entries below.
1. Mya Rondani, 1850
Rondani gave no etymology for the name but it is most often presumed that it is a corruption of the
Greek Myia, which dictionaries define as “fly” (the fact that Rondani’s genus-group name is
preoccupied by a mollusk described by Linnaeus confounds the presumption, but for purposes of this
eponymy, let’s pretend that Rondani had a fly in mind and not a mollusk).
The origin of the Greek “Myia” derives from various old Greek legends and stories, one of which is that
there was a maiden whose name was Myia who was vying with the goddess Selene for the love of
Zeus’s son, the handsome hunter Endymion. When the young man slept, she was constantly waking him
with her gossip, singing, and merriment. Finally, he lost patience, and Selene, in her wrath, turned Myia
to what she now is, a pesky fly. To this day, in her memory of Endymion, Myia still bothers sleepers in
their rest. Sounds more like a mosquito to me...
2. Anthrax belzebul Fabricius, 1794; Calobata belzebul Schiner, 1868; Mallophora belzebul
Schiner, 1867; Diopsis belzebuth Bigot, 1874; Tephritopyrgota belzebuth Hendel, 1914
The species-group name, here various spelled as belzebul or belzebuth, derives from the Hebrew Baʿal
Zəbûb itself from the Arabic: بابذلا لعب , Ba‘al az-Zubab, meaning “Lord of the Flies”. The spelling
Belzebub, deriving from the Arabic, has since evolved into other spellings, the most common current
version of which is “Beezelbub”.
Determining the history of the meaning of this name is a complex one as there are two biblical
interpretations: one from the Old Testament (the Lord of the Flies one) and a different one from the
New Testament (a demonic character equaling Satan). It is most likely, however, that the Old Testament
writers took the Arabic definition of the name and used it to deprecate idolatry; the New Testament
1 The title of this series owes its inspiration to ornithologist, nomenclaturalist, and bibliographer, Elliot Coues and his
“Ornthophilologicalities” that appeared in the 1884 The Auk (1: 49–58) as a retort to Prof. Augustus C. Merriam
and his disagreements with the etymological derivations for bird names given by Coues.