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Has there ever been an animal more wrongfully-named than the sperm whale? The name killer whale is just as bad. In that case, activists worked for twenty years to promote the name change to orca. Who can deny that having a different name makes human beings perceive the same animal in a far different light.

What's in a name? Maybe the best argument is offered by the Chinese proverb that tells us that naming is an art form that helps define the soul of the named. Surely, it is high time to refer to this magnificent species as something besides boiled blubber.

This great whale's brain is five times larger than the human brain. It is by far the largest brain of any creature that has ever inhabited the Earth and thus, the largest brain for which we have evidence anywhere in the universe. Intriguingly, studies of the dinosaur's bird-sized brain cavity suggests that big brains are not mandatory to control big bodies, because brain size correlates far more closely with intellect and sensory apparatus than motor control.

Today, the extent of the sperm whale's intellect remains unknown, and worthy of being understood as one of the great mysteries of our time. How do we even start to learn about this whale's intellect? The species rarely draws close to shore, and all we discern of its behavior is gleaned from behavior it shows us during the five percent of the time it surfaces to take a breath. We do know that the females with young and the larger breeding males only come together for mating. They spend the rest of the year separated by the distance of oceans.

The extent of our own ignorance is perhaps best demonstrated by the fact that until very recently humans related to it only as a repository for oil. A unique oily/waxy substance found in the "case" located in the species forehead, was the finest grade of machine oil known to man. Known as spermaceti, "the seed of the cetacean", the fluid was erroneously purported to be the whale's own seminal fluid. Why the females also had ample quantities of this so-called spermaceti, was never explained. This so-called "seed of the cetacean" was actually the seed of the Industrial Revolution. Engineers employed it to lubricate the new powerful machines that defined that age. Today, we find a suitable replacement for spermaceti in a common desert plant known as jojoba.

So we arrive at the ignorant, harmful, disrespectful name our English-speaking forebearers invented to refer to this brainy creature: the sperm whale. The Germans have named it no less opportunistically. They call it pottval, essentially the whale to be boiled down in huge pots. The pot roast of whales.

The French, the Spanish, the Italians, have named it more accurately, more gently, more respectfully: cachalot, after the Basque word for tooth. The name distinguishes it from all the other great whales which have baleen instead of teeth. The cachalot is the largest species within the odontocete or toothed-whale family, so-called to distinguish cetaceans possessing teeth — the dolphins, orcas, belugas — from baleen whales.

I'll say it again. Names have power. The name we give to a thing not only reflects the thing itself, but are metaphors of our own state of consciousness and culture. In this instance, we either refer to this species by upholding our own obtuseness, or we can grant this potential wisdomkeeper an accurate, and more courteous name. Cachalot. Spread the word.

Click here to read a report about a recent Interspecies field project with cachalots in the Azores.

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