What’s in a name?
The planet Mars has two moons. One named Phobos, the other Deimos. Jupiter has thirty, or at least thirty as far as I can recall from grade school. That translates to thirty exotic names all in all, to be memorized by young malleable minds. Let me see… Europa… Juno… Juno… Europa… argh… memory falters with age.
But here’s the thing. What’s the name of our moon? Moon, would be a common name. Not the proper names some nerd at the Harvard Observatory had to come up with for the Martian twin moons. Think about it. Our moon is nameless. No one has bothered to christen it anything. It’s like calling Pasig, the river. Notice, you don’t even need to capitalize the first letter of “moon”.
I am no great astronomer. I doubt I would ever discover a planet, a star, or a big enough chunk of rock in outer space to warrant a name. But as the man who first recognized the need to name our own moon, I therefore assume for myself the duty and great honor of naming Earth’s moon. I say, we call it Cory.
But here’s the thing. What’s the name of our moon? Moon, would be a common name. Not the proper names some nerd at the Harvard Observatory had to come up with for the Martian twin moons. Think about it. Our moon is nameless. No one has bothered to christen it anything. It’s like calling Pasig, the river. Notice, you don’t even need to capitalize the first letter of “moon”.
I am no great astronomer. I doubt I would ever discover a planet, a star, or a big enough chunk of rock in outer space to warrant a name. But as the man who first recognized the need to name our own moon, I therefore assume for myself the duty and great honor of naming Earth’s moon. I say, we call it Cory.
this is beautiful!
ReplyDeleteI'm glad you like the idea. We need a million signatures to get the deal done. :)
ReplyDeletehaha i think the moon was the moon already before they even thought of naming a space entity with a name of a roman deity and even naming flowers, comets with the name of person that discovered it.
ReplyDeleteIsn't our moon named Luna?
ReplyDeleteAhhhhhm, luna is the latin name for moon. Is it a proper name or a common name? When Latin was still a live language, men only knew of one moon -- The Moon. So there was no need to be specific. Hmmmm... what if we look at it this way, is aurus the proper name of gold?
ReplyDeleteMoon is the name of our natural satellite. Some damn elementary books just prefer to moon as common name for satellites. I think it is used so that we wont be confused every time the word satellite is used cause were more likely to think "satallites" as metallic objects with antennas orbiting around the earth used for telecommunications and getting signals for our t.v screens.
ReplyDeleteNotice that you spell "moon" with lower case "m". It is a common name, not a proper name. We need to give our moon a proper name.
ReplyDeleteMoon?
ReplyDelete