Talking of 'Britishisms', this had me rather intrigued:
I really wouldn't have thought of this as a possible meaning of the name. Is there anything backing up such a derivation? (I.e., a relation between "start" in "whitestart" -- and thus presumably also in "redstart" as applied to the American birds -- and the verb "to start"?)
Without looking it up, I certainly wouldn't have been able to say that "
"Start
" of course is the modern English reflex of Middle English stert, Old English steort, tail of an animal". But, OTOH, I'd never have thought about doubting that the meaning of "redstart" is "red-tail" (with red = "
reddish brown or reddish orange in color" a perfectly correct use of the word -- at least as correct as in [
this]...), as (1) having red (same meaning) in the tail is a major typical character of the group (the original one, that is), (2) these birds must be so called in more than half the languages that have a name for them, and (3) other Germanic languages indeed still use a very similar word for tail. (Thus we also have roodstaartje, rödstjärt, Rødstjert, Rotschwanz [and obsolete Rotsterz], rougequeue, codirosso, colirrojo, rabo-ruivo,
Ruticilla /
Rubicilla, φοινικουρος /
Phoenicurus, etc., which
all mean precisely the same thing.)
I suspect that this name, applied to black-and-white-started
Myiobori, may be much less likely to "upset" American native English speakers (who'll be used to it, and won't remember the meaning of the word), than the rest of the world (a significant part of which will be acutely aware of that meaning, and will see nothing else).