The ordinary photon is a member of the boson family. The leptons most familiar to the non-physicist are the electron and perhaps the neutrino; and the most familiar quarks are . . . well, there are no familiar quarks. Each of their six subspecies has been assigned an abstract name that serves no real philological, philosophical, or pedagogical purpose, except to distinguish it from the others: up and down, strange and charmed, and top and bottom.
