That's OrangUTAN to You!

We're all busy people in the zoo field, and we can't be expected to waste a lot of time of idle chit chat (I type as I listen to many of my coworkers who are, indeed, engaged in idle chitchat at the moment).  We need to keep conversations moving, as as such we need to be brief.  As a community, our lingo is full of acronyms, from AZA to ZAHP, some of which can overlap confusingly with more conventional uses of those same acronyms (a BFF is a black-footed ferret, not your best friend forever, though I suppose they could be the same, while a PDF refers not to a type of file format, but to a poison dart frog).

We also use a lot of short-hand with animals, abbreviating either their Latin names or their common ones.  Many of these have seeped into common usage, which is why many of our guests will speak of chimps, not chimpanzees, rhinos, not rhinoceroses, and hippos, not hippopotamuses (hippopotami).  

But there is one commonly-used short-hand for a popular zoo animal which we should not be using.  Recently, I came across a statement from the Orangutan SSP (itself several years old, but I just saw it for the first time now) explaining why, for reasons of linguistic accuracy and respect for Malay culture, it is not appropriate to call orangutans by the common nickname of "orang."

Orang-u-slang: Why "orang" is no substitute for "orangutan," by Rachel Davis

One commenter on the original post replied with an eye-roll emoji and said "There are more important things to worry about, like deforestation and poaching."  Yes, that's true.  If I had to pick between a world where orangutans were thriving in the wild but called "orangs" and one in which they were extinct, but everyone used the proper term, I know which one I would choose in a heartbeat.  That being said, stopping poaching and habitat loss is going to be an expensive, difficult, years-long struggle... whereas all the SSP is asking you to do is tack on two syllables to the name.  C'mon...

PS: After reading this, I did make a point of going through the blog and changing every use of the word "orang" to "orangutan" - or at least every one that I could find.  If I missed any, please feel free to let me know!