Content-Type: text/shitpost

The word “fuchsia” is often misspelled. If you have trouble remembering how to spell it, this advice may help:

Fuchsia is named after a German botanist, Leonhart Fuchs.

So it's just the name “Fuchs” (German for “Fox”), with “-ia” stuck on the end, similar to other familiar plant names, such as:

• Forsythia (William Forsyth),
• Macadamia (John Macadam),
• Zinnia (Johann Gottfried Zinn),
• Watsonia (Sir William Watson),
• Bougainvillea (Louis Antoine de Bougainville)

and many more. The scientific name for the Black-eyed Susan is Rudbeckia hirta, (given by Linnaeus!) after Olof Rudbeck and his father.

Wisteria is a bit of an oddity. It is (supposedly) named for Caspar Wistar, but the the spelling is a little different. Wikipedia has the story, such as it is.

This technique sometimes helps me with even harder-to-spell words. For example, what's the “E” in “E. coli”? It's Escherichia, which I would find impossible to remember let alone spell, if I didn't remember it was named for Doctor Escherich.