@saab,
As an aside, I only called it Wandering Jew by happenstance. That is a common name for the plant, and people italicize differently. For example, Sunset's Western Garden book puts the common names all in caps for easier readibility. People like me who have specified thousands of plants use the latin name first, with the first letter of the first word capitalized; if we use common names at all, it is for the convenience of the client. Many plants share common names, so the specificity of the latin is preferable.
I just went to the garage to check a copy of an old set of plans, and I see I used to capitalize the first letter of both words of the common names, which was when I had my own firm. Checked another set, when I worked in another firm, and I used all caps for the common names; that was a large set of plans for a whole housing tract, so I probably wanted the names to stand out for the client in the morass of pages of information. There wasn't any set rule on what we had to do. If I were in practice again I'd probably change to all non capitalized letters for the common name, and keep capitalizing the first letter of the latin name, since that is the standard in botany.
With the special case of the word jew, I could go either way. I tend to not capitalize words I used to, having to do with religions or people of various countries.
On putting that plant into the gravy boat, I think would be an act of irony/humor on the part of the person who planted it, depending on the person. Could be the opposite if it was an antisemitic person, but that's not what we're talking about in this thread.
