Why is a Venus flytrap a VENUS flytrap? There is nothing about a bug-eating plant that makes me look at it and think “oh, yes, Roman goddess of love!”. Seriously, these things are small, but their traps look downright sinister, like little vegetable mouths (which they are, in a sense. They’re also stomachs.)
So how/why did they get the “Venus” in their names. Wasn’t “flytrap” good enough on its own?
Ya got me. I’m still trying to understand why they had Venus Paradise Coloring Sets when I was kid
https://images.search.yahoo.com/search/images;_ylt=A0LEVy5VE9tVVKsAf8dXNyoA;_ylu=X3oDMTEyb2hkZnQ4BGNvbG8DYmYxBHBvcwMxBHZ0aWQDQjAzNjdfMQRzZWMDc2M-?p=Venus+Paradise+Color+By+Number+Sets&fr=yfp-t-412-s#id=9&iurl=http%3A%2F%2Fimg0.etsystatic.com%2F000%2F0%2F6586093%2Fil_570xN.294173564.jpg&action=click
Wikipedia is a bit obtuse, but if it already had a common name that is somewhat venereally related, I don’t think it’s much of a stretch to just name it after Venus.
Speculation in GQ:
From Ludovic’s Wiki link
I had always assumed it was a Vagina Dentata joke.
Not that Venus/Aphrodite was ever said to have had a vagina dentata, but simply evoking the name of the goddess of love rather than going straight to a more literally vaginal name which might have seemed too lowbrow for the scholarly botanical community.
Silly me having missed all of the vagina inferences. I assumed it was named for the planet. The alien planet. You know: not of this Earth; some strange extraterrestrial thing that is unlike other plants. I guess it comes from having seen an off-off-off-Broadway “Little Shop of Horrors” at the community theater when I was quite young.
This is the name origin for the DJ of the same name from WKRP in Cincinnati.
Perhaps the Lorelei Flytrap would have been more appropriate.
Ack! Somehow I made it past 50 years without ever noticing the very long teeth surrounding my wide open vagina or how it tends to snap shut when things come near. :rolleyes:
I sense a tinge of misogyny in this description…
Obviously the plants come from Venus. Just look at them. We’re lucky they don’t grow to enormous size in earth’s atmosphere and take over the Roman Coliseum.
If you think the poster here was being misogynous I think your perception is clouded and you’re seeing it peeking out from under too many bushes.
If you think 18th century Victorian scientists & natural philosophers lived and breathed what we today would call 180-plus proof level misogyny, you’re on real solid ground.
I couldn’t tell which you meant from your post. But I’m overly literal sometimes.
Didn’t the plant tend to grow in swampy meteor impact craters? Leading to theories it was not of this earth? I thought that was where the Venus thing came from, because before modern astronomy Venus was assumed to be a humid swampy planet.
The scientific name of the plant, Dionaea, refers to the Greek goddess of beauty, Aphrodite, and the equivalent of Venus in Roman mythology. Ostensibly, this is in reference to the plant’s beautiful white flowers, according to the description by John Ellis in 1768:
However, according to this, this was a cover story, and the name actually does refer to the similarity of the appearance of the leaves to female genitalia.
This would not be the only instance of scientists naming organisms because of their resemblance to human genitalia, others being the flower Clitoria and the penis worm Priapulus.
Certain areas of South Carolina, actually. 
Richard Wagner was going to name the abode of Venus in his opera *Tannhauser * “The Mound of Venus”, but one of his drinking buddies, a med student, remarked that might not be a good thing.
Not sure. How many flies did Lorelei trap and eat anyway?
Those Halloween episodes of Gilmore Girls must have been down-right Grim
No. It was named in the 1700s, before people really understood that meteorites could produce impact craters. Although it grows in swampy areas, these are not meteorite craters.
It was actually “Venus Rising”. Andy Travis misheard it as “Venus Flytrap” and it stuck.
According to OED, there were many other plants named after Venus before the flytrap, and few seem to have anything to do with the vagina (some even predate the term “vagina”*).
*In its current meaning.
The Carolina Bays are not impact craters. That was an old hypothesis, largely disproved. The last I had heard, we’re still not quite sure how they formed.
By Dionaea muscipula, obviously.
I can just picture millions of these little plants, tirelessly digging out these shallow, oval depressions throughout Eastern North Carolina with their little jaws. All under the gaze of Audrey 2, who is thinking, “This’ll keep those geologists baffled.”
