more specifically, the pronounciation of the word.
I just realized that for all I have read about Astronomy, I had never heard the word said aloud in english. I always thought it was said as “your anus” which made the juvenile jokes about Mr. Spock and toilet paper make sense. But today I was stuck at home watching the Science Channel and in about 4 shows, they always said it “U-rah-noos” or “OO-rah-noos”. What gives? Which is it? Has it changed recently? If it was never “Your anus” why the jokes?
AFAIK it was always pronounced “yer anus” until people got all giggly about that, and then some people changed the pronunciation to “YOO-rah-nus” to avoid having to say “yer anus.” BFD, says I.
Your Anus is the pronunciation I always knew. Was it British people that were pronouncing it differently. They just do that sometimes (Proof: aluminium instead of aluminum because it suits their style better.)
The Greek is Ouranos; the name was given at a time when Latinate adaptations of Greek names were SOP in cultured circles. OO-rahn-ohs would have been proper for the unadapted Greek. However, don’t forget that Englishmen adapted foreign names – the capital of France in English is Paris, rhyming with Harris, not Paree with a glottal R. “Mother’s bovine” (Moscow) rather than MAWSK-vah for Moskva. Florence for Firenze, Leghorn for Livorno, etc.
So traditional English was Uranus, pronounced with a long A to match your anus. More properly it should have been you-RAH-nus and that was a minority pronunciation. But it got the palatalized initial English U, much like Ulysses (whose name never began with a YOU until it crossed the English Channel). Pedants will tell you to put the accent on the first syllable, but that only alters the pun, as it then is a homophone for “urinous” (redolent of urine).
Maybe Herschel was right and we should have stuck with “George.”
The first time I noticed that someone had changed the pronunciation was when Sagan did his Cosmos series on PBS. He pronounced it, approximately, “Oor-uh-nus.”
For those who don’t remember, that was the program that gave birth to the phrase “BILLyuns and BILLyuns.”
National Lampoon once ran one of their fake letters complaining that none of the pronunciations was acceptable – “Your Anus” or "Urine Us’ or “You’re in Us”.
As I’ve said before on this Board, I think any of these are more acceptable than its original name — “George”.
That’s right. William Herschel, who discovered it, the first major planet to be found ince the days of antiquity, decided to use the occasion to brown-nose for royal favor by naming after Britain’s King George, suggestimg it be called “Georgium Sideris” Talk anbout Your Anus. The name was used for a while, too, although some people, wanting to give the discoverer credit, called it “Herschel”. Finally, folks decided to follow the pattern of the other planets, and name it after a Graeco-Roman deity, a practice they continued to follow with Neptune and Pluto and lors of other bodies until they ran out of Graeco-Roman names, at which point they started delving into other mythologies.
The Sanskrit godname cognate of Greek Ουρανος is Varuṇa वरुण whose name is translated ‘All-Enveloping Sky’. It’s easy to pronounce. It affords no giggles even to 3rd-graders (or the developmental equivalent thereof). We should rename the planet Varuna. Many years ago, Arthur C. Clarke promised in Rendezvous with Rama that we would get some Hindu godnames for planets eventually. Well?
Isaac Asimov always had an aversion to this name. He thought with the scarcity of planets couldn’t they think of a better name?
Asimov said even if you avoided the “Your Anus” pronunciation, you still have a pretty unpleasant connotation with the urinous pronunciation.
(Isaac Asimov also had a complaint about naming many of those rare earth elements after the obscure Scandinavian locations where they were discovered).
Except Mr. Sagan (R.I.P.) said in his last book that he never said “billions AND billions” in Cosmos–he just emphasized “billions” so much that the phrase made itself up and got stuck. (After all, why say the former when the latter means the same thing.)
