View Message

1. Yes and yes.
2. No.
3. I think it's a nice name that refers to a flower.

---

I don't think you are wrong at all if it bothers you too much, to use Linnea. I understand why you feel that way. But it wouldn't bother me, at least not in this case. Here is my perspective.

---

The political ideas of Linnaeus are irrelevant to a person named Linnea today. To me the name Linnea refers to a flower, not to Linnaeus the man and all his ideas. Just like Zinnia refers to zinnias and not to Johann Gottfried Zinn or any of his ideology. (Zinnias were also named by Linnaeus, along with some 9000 other plants)

---

I have a neighbor named Linnea and (despite my being aware of Linnaeus's 18th century ideas) if it had ever crossed my mind that her name was like an occult expression of her parents' acceptance of white supremacy, I would suspect myself of incipient dementia. It'd be paranoid.

---

I think it's highly likely that the vast majority of educated Swedish men in the 18th century, who gave it any thought at all, would have shared or at least accepted Linnaeus's ideas about human races. Their ignorance about human races reflects what was typical for their time and society. Even if you didn't know for sure that Linnaeus, in particular, had expressed ugly ideas about race ... it would still be virtually guaranteed that thousands of the botanical Latin names we use today would have been assigned by some other European man who was as ignorant about race, and would have been willing to express similar ideas. Because they were accepted in that time and place, generally.

---

Old ideas can't reach into the present and threaten us through names. Linnea flowers can be cultivated and enjoyed and called linneas by people of all races, without there being anything weird about it. Alexander Graham Bell was a eugenicist who thought that deaf people should be exterminated. Eugenics used to be allied with evolutionary science, and anti-eugenics was considered a religious anti-science point of view. Into the 20th century even. But after eugenics became unacceptable, Bell's eugenicist ideas were totally irrelevant for decades, to everyone who paid phone bills to a company named after Bell. The company even distributed TDDs to its deaf customers. We can often recognize the accomplishments of people from history, with names, without referring to their personal ideologies that reflected their political context centuries ago. Attaching their ideas to their names and erasing their names, does not make the ideas disappear. We still have to confront them where we find them in our own time and place.

---

Well I hope this helps you decide that Linnea is usable! But if it doesn't for you, I still understand.

---

- mirfak