Astrology is something of a “discredited science”, but a few words relating to the personality traits associated with the planets are still in common use. The best known such word is probably jovial; mercurial and saturnine are still occasionally used too, and martial has taken on a much broader meaning than just “astrologically governed by Mars.” Venereal would complete the set, but somehow that one ended up with a meaning not referring to personality traits.
Well, “planet” comes from a Greek word meaning “wanderer”, and that word accurately describes a property of planets, namely, that they are in motion, which stars do not (relative to their solar system). I wouldn’t include that in a least of words derived from defunct theories, since it was developed in a cosmological model that is not defunct with respect to the characteristics of planets.
Has that been disproved?
Did it not presume (and I’m legitimately asking this, not being snarky) that all those shiny bits up in the sky were the same thing, and that the only difference between the stars and the planets were that the latter wandered?
To me, that seems to me to be just a terminological thing. Even though the term brontosaurus was abandoned in science in favour or apatosaurus, neither word is inherently more or less correct than the other - scientists have simply adopted a naming convention. I guess this lies at the root of Chronos’ rather snippy remark.
Astrology has contributed a lot of other terms to modern metaphors as well.
If your “star is in the ascendant”, you’re experiencing good fortune: a reference to the astrological doctrine that the “ascendant” or “horoscopic point”, where the zodiac crosses the eastern horizon, makes a celestial body especially influential. (If your “evil star is in the ascendant”, that’s not so good.) A lot of related expressions, such as being “born under a lucky star”, have similar origins.
If you’re at the “zenith” or the “nadir” of your fortunes, that likewise reflects the astrological associations of the directions up and down, respectively.
Except that the “planets” at least sometimes were held to include the Sun and Moon as well as the bodies we now call planets; or at least, that the planets were grouped with the Sun and Moon as moving bodies, in contrast to the “fixed” stars.
Yep, the classical planets. That’s why I say if they’re going to demote Pluto, they really ought to cowboy up and take out Uranus and Neptune as well, and then put the Sun and Moon back in.
You would have to take out Earth as well, which according to classical theory was not a planet.
Personally, I think that we should have three separate terms for rockballs, gasballs, and iceballs: Sure, Pluto isn’t much like Jupiter or Earth, but then, Jupiter and Earth aren’t much like each other, either. But we’re kind of stuck with “planet”, now.
And I’m not so sure that terms like “martial” and “jovial” are so much from astrology, as they are from the gods the planets were named for in the first place. Mars was the god of war regardless of what the red planet is doing, and there are plenty of other words that come directly from gods that didn’t have planets named after them.
Thanks, forgot to mention Earth - it’ll have to come out as well. Sorry Earth!
No. The Brontosaurus was an adult skeleton mismatched to a juvenile head, and no such creature ever thundered across the lands. The Apatosaurus correctly matched the adult body with an adult head. It’s more than just a different name or language.
In my defense, I took a look at the OED before I wrote the post. Here’s the run-down:[ul][li]Jovial derives from an Italian word (16th c.) specifically meaning “born under the planet Jove”, which in turn derives from the Latin for “of or pertaining to Jupiter”. Whether the Latin refers to the planet or the God is unclear. The oldest citation in the OED is specifically in the astrological sense, though the earliest “like the God” sense comes only 15 years after that.[]Mercurial: in this case, the OED’s reference to the “God-like” sense of the word predate those for the astrological sense by about 100 years. A footnote, however, admits that it is difficult to distinguish between the two senses of the word.[]Saturnine: the OED does not list the “God-like” sense as a possible meaning, only the “influenced by the planet” sense.[*]Martial: The weakest of the four, I’ll admit. The OED’s references have the “God-like” sense predating the “planet-influenced” sense by about 50 years. However, the “courageous & warlike” sense of the word predates both of them by about 100 years.[/ul][/li]
Of course, the roots all four of these words are older than the English language, so the OED can’t possibly be the whole story. It’d be interesting to know whether the astrological attributes associated with these planets were directly drawn from the gods, whether the mythology of the gods was influenced by pre-existing astrological practices, or whether it was all of a piece. There’s probably an Ancient History Ph.D. thesis or two in it somewhere.
IME people are more likely to see falling stars than meteors.
Association of planets with specific deities was part of ancient Mesopotamian celestial divination practices, and was imitated in classical antiquity: thus Aphrodite/Venus took over from the Semitic fertility goddess Astarte/Ishtar/etc. as the deity associated with the planet we now call Venus, and Jupiter was similarly assigned in imitation of the Babylonian god Marduk, and so on.
There have been lots of attempts to reconstruct aspects of classical mythology as interpretations of astronomical phenomena, but they’re generally not very persuasive. Anyway, Greek astrology per se didn’t really get going until the Hellenistic period when Greek philosophers learned a lot about Babylonian astronomical and divinatory practices, by which time the standard Greek stories about the gods were pretty firmly established.
No. The nomenclatural problem didn’t have anything to do with a mismatch, but rather that the name Apatosaurus had priority over Brontosaurus. Apatosaurus was described in 1877 from a partial skeleton, and Brontosaurus in 1879 from a more complete skeleton. When, in 1903, comparison showed the bones belonged to the same kind of animal, the rules of scientific nomenclature demanded that Apatosaurus replace Brontosaurus.
The original Brontosaurus skeleton lacked a head, and when it was mounted for display in 1905, a composite skull modeled on the related genus Camarasaurus was used. As it turns out, the actual Apatosaurus skull is quite different.
The mounted skeleton, under the name Brontosaurus, attracted a great deal of publicity, and the animal became known to the general public under that name. It took a long time for it to become general knowledge that the correct name was Apatosaurus.
In my view, “brontosaurus” (lower case, and not in italics) is perfectly correct as a common name for the animal. Common names need not follow the rules of scientific nomenclature. Of course, in any technical publication Apatosaurus would have to be used.
I most often hear “shooting stars,” but yea, this.
The word auspices was derived from the Latin auspex, who were fortune tellers who watched how birds flew.
Furthermore, they were not particularly terrible. It’s just that an archeologist is more likely to stumble first into one of the few terrible than a teeny tiny one.
I know this is off topic, but your post made me wonder – where would you draw lines between rock, gas and ice in regards to planetary science? Are there already accepted definitions?
To me, a logical division would be:
A) Fluid outside, fluid inside
B) Fluid outside, solid inside
C) Solid outside, fluid inside
D) Solid outside, solid inside
Or juicies, mushies, squishies and balls 