Milkomeda: Please no

Why astronomers should not be allowed to name things

Photo by Олег Мороз on Unsplash

This week’s word comes courtesy of a hardy group of astronomers who, noting that the Andromeda galaxy, above, is barreling towards our own Milky Way at a breathtaking 110 kilometres a second, have begun speculating on names for the smooshed-together galaxy that would ensue should the two collide. Their solution, arrived at only after the even more terrible Andromeway was rejected: Milkomeda.

From this we can assert two things. One, astronomers should not be allowed to name anything, ever. Two, despite the first assertion, even astronomers can recognise an onomastic bar beneath which they will not stoop.

Milkomeda is a portmanteau; that is, a combination of two or more words, jammed and often morphed together to form a new word whose meaning is somehow a combination of the two. Smog, for example, is a smushed together version of smoke and fog. Bollywood owes its existence to Bombay and Hollywood. And we’re all familiar with brunch, hangry, and bromance – portmanteau words all.

Portmanteau words are distinct from compound words like latecomer and letterbox, whose meaning is additive and predictable, rather than combinatorial in nature, and that are constructed simply by bolting two words together with no change to either. It’s the combinative aspect that gives portmanteau words an element of surprise and amusement – even when they’re applied to shocking events like the demise of two formerly healthy galaxies.

Now you may be wondering where portmanteau itself comes from. It’s French for a kind of suitcase that opens into two or more compartments. Lewis Carroll borrowed it to describe words like brillig and slithy that he invented for his poem Jabberwocky, capturing the notion of “two meanings packed into one word”.

You’ll also be thrilled to learn, I’m sure, that the word onomastic didn’t just pop into my head earlier. I googled “science of naming things”, and this is one of the words that popped up and I can’t recommend outsourcing knowledge in this way highly enough if you want to save space in your brain while appearing to know way more than you actually do. Onomastic is from the Greek onomastikos, “of or belong to naming”, and is related to a surprisingly large number of other multisyllabic English word-related words like acronym, binomial, denominate, ignominious, metonymy, onomateopoeia, and synonym. The name Jerome (meaning “holy name”) also belongs on that list, as do the far less prepossessing, but nonetheless important, words name and noun.

Onomastics is, of course, not to be confused with onamism, although when people offer up Milkomeda as a name for one of creation’s great accomplishments, you have to wonder. The latter word takes its name from Onan, the biblical son of Judah, who “spilled his seed on the ground” rather than impregnate his dead brother’s wife and risk a paternity suit. Little did he know the guilt he would thus visit upon hormonally fueled teenagers down the millennia, courtesy of men dressed in far too many silk-lined robes, fueled themselves by an unwavering belief that the creator of the universe and the infinite wonders within it spends his time worrying about what people do with the tingly bits of their bodies when alone.

Onomastics is similar to nomenclature: both are to do with naming things. But whereas onomastics leans towards proper names - whether to do with places, objects, people or entire galaxies - nomenclature can encompass all kinds of terminology, capitalised or not.

As if it wasn’t already arcane enough, onomastics can be divided into further specialties like toponymy (the study of place names), anthroponymy (personal names), literary onomastics (names of works of literature) and socio-onomastics (names within a society or culture).

Lest you think I’m taking the piss here, let me tell you that socio-onomastics gets my undiluted respect for including within its ambit the study of nicknames. That includes how they get created and signal belonging or social hierarchy; the degree to which they’re accepted by the nicknamee or imposed upon them; and how a nickname that was once prestigious can, over time, become derogatory. When I was in my 30s, baby boomer was a badge to be worn proudly. Now, not only has the nickname undergone a profound fall from grace, it’s even been brutally pared down by younger people to boomer.

Bloody millennials or Gen-Xers or whoever they are.

As a rule, however, I’m a big fan of nicknames, mostly because of their potential for humour. I’ve heard of a rigger called Tony who his mates dubbed Pasta, and a man with a lazy eye who got called Wes, short for “where’s he looking?”

Photo by John Torcasio on Unsplash

Most nicknames are given to males, and sometimes the humour they embody can be dark indeed. My brother, who works in the fire service, had a colleague who, running to hop on the appliance that was heading out to an emergency, slipped and fell under the back wheel. On his return to work after months of recovery from a shattered pelvis, he was immediately dubbed Wheel Chock. I don’t think I’ve yet found a woman who finds that story funny, but almost every man I share it with finds it hilarious. I’m sure that somewhere there lives a study about why this difference exists, and I dearly hope that whoever wrote it still holds out a glimmer of hope for men.

Whether we warrant such hope is another question. I’m happy to inform you, though, that astronomers, who long believed a collision between our galaxy and Andromeda was inevitable, now think it’s merely one possibility. There are signs that the Milky Way, assisted by the gravitational pull of a couple of other galaxies in our neighbourhood, may be pulling off the slowest sidestep in history, and will, in about five billion years, wave its matador’s cape with a flourish as Andromeda slides harmlessly by.

Andromeda (left) failing to make contact with the Milky Way (right). Photo by Paul Kenny McGrath on Unsplash

But don’t get too comfortable, friends. In news you will not find in your daily feed, the Milky Way has already collided more than once with the Sagittarius Dwarf Spheroidal Galaxy (blokey astronomer nickname: Sgr dSph), and is on track to repeat the performance in another 100 million years or so.

I’d like to see our friends at Nasa come up with a portmanteau name for that marriage.

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Bits and specious

In what may yet prove to be a futile move, I’m out to breathe new life into Lingwistics and am considering one of two things (or maybe both). The first is to write about, in no particular order, works of fiction that have shaped me as a writer, and look at why and how they’ve had that impact. The other is to find a new word in my reading each week whose definition is unclear to me. This week’s word is atavistic, which I’ve learned means “relating to or characterised by reversion to something ancient or ancestral: atavistic fears and instincts.” A character in Annie Proulx’s wonderful novel The Shipping News uses it, which I regard as an uncharacteristic slip in her normally sure touch for natural-sounding dialogue.

Galaxies don’t collide in the usual sense of the word. The distances between stars is so vast (think ping pong balls spaced thousands of kilometres apart) that stars don’t bang into each other, great tv viewing as that would be. What does happen, though, is an unimaginable amount of messy gravitational interaction that sees stars and solar systems torn out of their usual orbit and, in some cases, even ejected from the newly merged galaxy.

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Quote of the week

It ain’t what they call you, it’s what you answer to.
WC Fields