Equalising Ecuador

Familiarity leaves you blind, and it's terribly easy not to notice that El Salvador is just The Saviour or that Ecuador is simply the Spanish word for equator, because the equator runs through Ecuador.

And what is the equality that makes the equator so equal? Well it's the celestial equator really, which is the one up in the sky. When the sun is on the celestial equator, which it is twice a year at the equinoxes, then day and night are equally long.

Pluto, Plutocracy and Plutonium

Pluto was the god of the underworld. He was also the god of wealth. That is why we have plutocracy (government by the wealthy), plutocrats and plutomania. This last word either means a frenzied pursuit of money, or the delusional belief that you are already rich. I veer between the two.

Plutonium is not rich, it is so named merely because it is Neptunium's neighbour in the periodic table just as Pluto is Neptune's neighbour in space. Pluto the dog of Disney is named after the planet, or at least he got the name only a few months after the planet, so there must have been some connection.

Finally, Operation Pluto was part of the D-Day landings and stood for Pipelines Under The Ocean.

And with that, this series on planets drifts off into the Kuiper Belt like some lachrymose extra from 2001: A Nine-Year-Old Space Odyssey.

The Inky Fool begs for a loan

P.S. A philoplutary is a lover of money


P.P.S. Anyone considering leaving a comment about how Pluto isn't a planet no more, can take that thought, cover it in brambles, and stick it where the sun only shines very, very faintly.

Uranus

The purpose of Uranus is, of course, to make me snigger. The planet was originally called Georgium Sidus - George's Star - after King George the Third. The name was then changed to Neptune, which, though it's less obviously patriotic, was still meant to celebrate the victories of the British over the revolting Americans. Then a compromise was suggested of Neptune George III, but it was, of course, a foreigner, and a German at that, called Johann Bode who proposed Uranus.

You see, Mars is the son of Jupiter and Jupiter is the son of Saturn and Saturn is the son of Uranus (or Ouranos), so the solar system was allowed to progress like a divine family tree heading outward into the dark.

Bode's suggestion was backed up by a German chemist who had just discovered a new element and decided to call it Uranium in order to make the name fashionable. To the delight of schoolboys all over the anglosphere, it worked.

Uranus, in Greek, simply meant sky or heaven, the god being but a personification. This is the root of the lovely word Ouranophantor, one who reveals heavenly mysteries, and Uranomania, the belief that you are of divine descent.

However, Uranian also used to mean homosexual. This was not because homosexuality might be heavenly, but to do with the birth of Aphrodite as recounted in Plato's Symposium. There are two accounts of the birth of Aphrodite, goddess of love. The first is that she was the daughter of Zeus and Dione, the second that she was the child of Uranus. In the latter case she would have no female parent, and so Plato took the story of Uranian descent to imply that love need not involve a woman.

The term popped up in English in 1893 in the works of John Addington Symonds, who may have invented it. He wrote:

Thou standest on this craggy cove,
Live image of Uranian love.

Uranian was Oscar Wilde's preferred term for his proclivities. In 1898 he wrote a letter to Robert Ross saying:

To have altered my life would have been to have admitted that Uranian love is ignoble. I hold it to be noble - more noble than other forms.

Symonds also called Uranian love l'amour de l'impossible - love of the impossible - whether he or Wilde delighted in the Uranian pun is not, alas, recorded.

Oscar Wilde contemplating Uranus

World

When God created the English language He very sensibly took several words and made them nearly unrhymable. He did this to stop bad poets going on about love, life and the world. Though you can make it to hurled, you then get stuck with curled and furled. You can't even use whirled because Rhyming With A Homonym Is Cheating. As David Bowie shouldn't have sung in Starman:

I had to call someone so I picked on you.
Hey, that's far out. So you heard him too.
Turn on the TV, we may pick him up on channel two.

World originally meant stuff people do or human life. It therefore got contrasted to Heaven, which is the next world. And from there it came to mean the little planet that the majority of Inky Fool readers call home. Earth, which originally just meant soil (as opposed to, say, water), similarly got saddled with new meaning.

Venus

No reasonable person can look at the word Venus without trying to rhyme it with something. It's like wombat: it's impossible. This is a mite unfair on the poor old lady. Venus has got a terrible press. From her do we get venal, venom, venial and venereal disease.

Vener is the Latin genitive. One early science fiction writer, W.A. Lach-Szyrma (of whom much much more later), wrote:

I must also apologise for the word "Venusian". I know well that compounds ought to be derived from the genitive Veneris; but these are already connected with ideas opposed to those I wish to convey.

Having a planet named after you is small compensation for such indignity. Even Shakespeare in Venus and Adonis makes her out as a slightly dotty and unwanted nymphomaniac.

Her Greek equivalent Aphrodite rhymes with nightie and gave us aphrodisiac.

I have already blogged about Venus of the Beautiful Bottom, and know nothing about fly-traps.

The Inky Fool was in a hurry and couldn't chat

Mercury

For the next few days we shall devote ourselves, dear star-crossed reader, to the study of the wandering stars, or stellae errantes, vulgarly known as planets. The first of these and the closest to the sun is Mercury.

Once upon a time the Romans traded stuff, which they called merx. From this we get merchandise, merchant, market, mercenary and mercer. Merx also meant that the god of trade was called Mercury.

To each planet was assigned a metal: Saturn had lead, Jupiter tin, Mars iron, and Venus copper. However, the only planetary-metallic name to have survived is mercury, the stuff you find in thermometers and tuna.

Also, those born when the planet Mercury is ascendant are liable to be fast-moving and energetic and, in a word, mercurial.






P.S. To amalgamate something is to combine it with mercury. It's an old alchemical term that seems to derive from malagma in Latin, which meant bandage.