Phil Plait, sometimes denizen of these Boards, and always The Bad Astronomer, in his blog often uses the word ‘enselenate’, and seemingly always in place of the word ‘enlarge’ or ‘magnify’ as in “click to enselenate (this pic)”.
All that said, I can’t find enselenate in any dictionary although a Google search for it yields lots of hits . . . all to The Bad Astronomer!
So, I presume his use of the word is either some in-joke or a private campaign for a possibly useful neologism. Anyone know more?
They all seem to be pictures of the Moon. Selene was the Moon goddess. I think it is a word he made up to mean something like “moonify”, make the picture more Moonish.
njtt beat me to “moonify”, but also note that magnify and moonify sound kind of similar, adding another layer to the pun. When you magnify the moon, you moonify.
He writes things like that all the time in his blog. “Click to galactinate”, “Click to ennebulaplateanate”, “Click to enplasmanate” are from recent entries. They all seem perfectly cromulent to me.
