Maybe it’s just me, but it seems to me that Texans pronounce words differently than many others. When I look at an unfamiliar word, I pronounce it, at least in my mind, as it appears, syllable by syllable. For example, Salvia superbum – “SAL-via SUPER-bum” rather than “SAL-via su-PERB-um”.

I will admit that botanical names are often convoluted. Moreover, many times their pronunciation doesn’t follow the conventions that I was taught in school. For example, when a vowel is followed by a vowel, the first vowel is pronounced in long form. As an example, wait is pronounced “wayt”. Not necessarily so if it was botanical Latin.

Other problems with botanical names are that many are derived from, among other things, a person for whom they were named, a place, a part of the human anatomy, for a c

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