A Word about Words

—lewis carroll, alice’s adventures in wonderland

“When we were little,” the Mock Turtle went on at last, more calmly,

though still sobbing a little now and then, “we went to school in the sea.

The master was an old Turtle—we used to call him Tortoise.”

“Why did you call him Tortoise, if he wasn’t one?” Alice asked.

“We called him Tortoise because he taught us,” said the Mock Turtle

angrily: “really you are very dull!”

The first problem that faces someone trying to write a popular book about the mem-

bers of the Order Testudines is what to call them. Different corners of the English-speaking

world use the names turtle, tortoise, and terrapin in contradictory ways. Originally, the

word turtle meant sea turtles only. Freshwater turtles were terrapins, and their heavy-footed

land-based relatives were tortoises. That is still the usage in England (where, of course,

there are no turtles, except for the occasional sea turtle). South Africans tend to follow

British usage, calling their freshwater turtles terrapins even though most of them belong

to a quite different branch of the Testudines order from the terrapins of the Northern

Hemisphere. In North America, the name terrapin became restricted to a single species,

the Diamondback Terrapin (Malaclemys terrapin). All other freshwater turtles, unless they

were specifically called something else, like cooter (an African-derived word) or slider,

became simply turtles.

Meanwhile, in Australia, where “true” tortoises do not exist, everything that was not a

sea turtle, including some animals that almost never leave the water, was called a tortoise.

Today, the tendency in Australia is to call them all turtles instead.

I have decided, for the purposes of this book, to adopt, by and large, the North

American usage. In this book, then, when I say “turtles” I mean the whole lot, tor-

toises and terrapins thrown in. For the scientific names of individual species, but

not always for English ones, I follow Turtles of the World, 2011 Update: Annotated

Checklist of Taxonomy, Synonymy, Distribution, and Conservation Status, the most

recent list of the turtles of the world adopted by the Turtle Taxonomy Working

Group of the IUCN Tortoise and Freshwater Turtle Specialist Group (TFTSG). I

have followed the 2011 update in capitalizing English names of species and subspe-

cies. I use the South African name padloper (which means “trailwalker” in Afrikaans)

for the pygmy tortoises of the genus Homopus, for no better reason than that I like the

way it sounds.