Pluto

True-color image of the dwarf planet Pluto, taken by the New Horizons spacecraft, 2015

27 March 2023

The trans-Neptunian object Pluto was discovered in 1930 by Clyde Tombaugh, a twenty-four-year-old researcher at the Lowell Observatory in Flagstaff, Arizona. The observatory’s founder, Percival Lowell, had predicted the existence of a “Planet X” in 1916, and Tombaugh had been hired in 1929 to conduct a systematic search for the predicted planet. Tombaugh discovered the object on 18 February 1930. The observatory announced the discovery on 13 March 1930, the seventy-fifth anniversary of Percival Lowell’s birth.

It is now widely recognized that Lowell’s prediction of a Planet X was wrong, and that Tombaugh’s discovery was happenstance. (There may possibly be a large planet beyond Neptune, but if so, it does not accord with Lowell’s mathematical prediction.) And Pluto’s size (about one-fifth the mass of the Earth’s moon) and eccentric orbit does not fit with the other planets. Pluto is now known to be just one of many such trans-Neptunian objects in the Kuiper Belt.

Yet at the time, the discovery of what was hailed as the ninth planet produced a flurry of suggested names. The name Pluto, the Roman god of the underworld, was suggested by an English schoolgirl, Venetia Burney. Her grandfather, a retired librarian who had worked at the Bodleian Library passed the suggestion on in a letter to a friend, an Oxford professor of astronomy, who happened to be attending a meeting of the Royal Astronomy Society in London at the time. The suggestion was immediately telegraphed from the meeting to the Lowell Observatory. Others may have independently thought of the name, but Burney’s suggestion is likely to have been the first to reach Flagstaff.

The first mention of the name Pluto in print that I have found is in a 23 March 1930 article in the Boston Globe that includes it in a list of potential names for the body being suggested by the US Naval Observatory:

According to Capt. Freeman, Minerva appears to be the only major deity of the Graeco-Roman mythology not employed as a name of an important celestial body. Among the other names suggested for the planet and received at the Naval Observatory are Leda, Atlas, Cronos, Pluto, Lowell, and Percival, the last two names [sic] those of Prof Lowell.

On 25 March 1930, the Associated Press reported that Italian astronomers were also suggesting the name Pluto. This story was printed in newspapers across North America the following day:

“Pluto” is the provisional name that Italian astronomers have given the new trans-Neptune planet discovered on March 13 at Lowell Observatory, in Flagstaff, Arizona.

Whether the Naval Observatory and the Italian astronomers were aware of Burney’s suggestion or if they chose the name independently is unknown, but it’s reasonable to assume that multiple people thought of it as Pluto was an obvious choice for several reasons: Pluto was the only major Greco-Roman god not to have an astronomical body named for him; he was the god of the underworld, an appropriate moniker for an object in the far reaches of the solar system; and the name began with PL, the initials of Percival Lowell.

The Lowell Observatory decided on the name Pluto that May, with an announcement on either 24 or 26 May. The date of the official announcement is uncertain because there was evidently a leak in advance of the official announcement. The Associated Press reported the announcement on 24 May 1930, but this may have been the result of the leak in advance of the official announcement. A longer Associated Press article that includes a transcript of the official announcement and details about the naming deliberations appears on 26 May:

Pluto has been selected by scientists of the Lowell observatory here as the name for the recently discovered transneptunian body which they believe is the long-sought Planet X. The name is symbolic of the comparatively dark and distant regions thru which the celestial body rides in its orbit about the sun.

The announcement was made by Roger Lowell Putnam, trustee of the observatory and nephew of the late Dr. Percival Lowell, founder of the observatory, who predicted the existence of Planet X 16 years ago.

Mr. Putnam, who came here from Springfield, Mass., to take part in the official naming of Planet X, revealed that Pluto was selected after the host of suggested names had been narrowed down to three—Minerva, Pluto and Cronus.

“We felt,” said Mr. Putnam, “that the line of Roman gods for whom other planets are named should not be broken and we believed that Dr. Lowell would have felt the same way.

“The discovery of this planet is so preeminently a triumph of reasoning that Minerva, the goddess of wisdom, would have been our choice if her name had not for so many years been borne by an asteroid.

“Cronus, the son of Uranus and the father of Neptune, would have been appropriate, but so is Pluto, the god of the regions of darkness where Planet X holds sway. Jupiter and Neptune already are in the heavens and it seems particularly appropriate that the third brother should have a place.”

Mr. Putnam added that Pluto lent itself easily to the monogram “P.L.,” the initials of Percival Lowell, and “would be a fitting memorial to him.”

“We therefore felt,” Mr. Putnam concluded, “that Pluto is the proper name for the planet and are so suggesting to the American Astronomical society and the Royal Astronomical society.”

The announcement of the naming was due to a premature report that leaked from a printing office.

In 2006 the International Astronomical Union officially demoted Pluto from planetary status, labeling it as a dwarf planet.

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Sources:

Associated Press. “Name is Chosen for New Planet” (25 March 1930). Globe (Toronto), 26 March 1930, 12. ProQuest Historical Newspapers.

———. “Name Pluto Given to Body Believed to Be Planet X” (24 May 1930), New York Times, 25 May 1930, 1. ProQuest Historical Newspapers.

———. “Pluto Picked as Name for New Planet.” Asbury Park Evening Press, 26 May 1930, 3. ProQuest Historical Newspapers.

Grimes, William. “Venetia Phair Dies at 90; as a Girl, She Named Pluto” (online 10 May 2009). New York Times, 11 May 2009, A21.

Hoyt, William Graves. “W.H. Pickering’s Planetary Predictions and the Discovery of Pluto.” Isis, 67.4, December 1976, 551–64 at 557. JSTOR.

Oxford English Dictionary, third edition, September 2006, s.v. Pluto, n.1.

“Planet ‘Minerva,’ Navy’s Suggestion” (22 March 1930). Boston Globe, 23 March 1930, A19. ProQuest Historical Newspapers.

“Pluto, in Astronomy.” Columbia Electronic Encyclopedia, 6th edition, 2021.

boron

Boron

24 March 2023

Boron is brittle, lustrous metalloid with the atomic number five and the symbol B. Its salt, borax, has been known since antiquity, but its pure form wasn’t isolated and recognized as an element until chemist Humphry Davy did so in 1807. Davy initially proposed the name boracium, but redubbed it boron upon concluding the -um ending was inappropriate for a non-metal.

The name comes from the Medieval Latin borax and the Old French boreis. The Latin word is borrowed from the Arabic البورق (buraq), which comes from the Persian بوراکس (bura). In medieval use, borax could refer to a variety of similar minerals, not just the hydrated borate of sodium, which is the Present-Day technical definition of the word.

The Middle English form of the name, boras, appears by the 1380s in the General Prologue to The Canterbury Tales. In his description of the Summoner, Chaucer says that borax is one of the substances that could not cure the skin disease the man suffers from:

A somonour was ther with us in that place,
That hadde a fyr-reed cherubynnes face,
For saucefleem he was, with eyen narwe.
As hoot he was and lecherous as a sparwe,
With scalled browes blake and piled berd.
Of his visage children were aferd.
Ther nas quyk-silver, lytarge, ne brymstoon,
Boras, ceruce, ne oille of tartre noon,
Ne oynement that wolde clense and byte,
That hym myghte helpen of his whelkes white,
Nor of the knobbes sittynge on his chekes.

(A summoner was there with us in that place,
Who had a fire-red cherubim’s face,
For he was leprous, with swollen eyelids.
He was as hot and lecherous as a sparrow,
With scabby, black eyebrows and depilated beard,
Of his visage, children were afraid.
There was no mercury, lead monoxide, nor sulfur,
Nor any borax, white lead, nor oil of tarter,
No ointment that would cleanse and bite,
That might help him with his white pimples,
Or with the knobs sitting on his cheeks.)

The name of the element itself was coined in 1812, five years after its discovery. That year, Davy wrote of the coinage:

In my first paper on this substance I named it boracium, for I supposed that in its pure form it would be found to be metallic; subsequent experiments have not justified this conjecture. It is more analogous to carbon than to any other substance; and I venture to propose Boron as a more unexceptionable name; the termination in um having been long used as characteristic of a metal. M.M. Gay Lussac and Thenard have proposed to call it Bore, a word that cannot with propriery be adopted in our language, though short and appropriate in the French nomenclature.

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Sources:

Chaucer, Geoffrey. “General Prologue.” The Canterbury Tales, lines 630–33. Harvard’s Geoffrey Chaucer Website.

Davy, Humphry. Elements of Chemical Philosophy, part 1, vol. 1. Philadelphia: Bradford and Inskeep, 1812, 178. HathiTrust Digital Archive.

Dictionary of Medieval Latin from British Sources, 2013, s.v. borax. Brepols: Database of Latin Dictionaries.

Middle English Dictionary, 2019, s.v. boras, n.

Oxford English Dictionary, second edition, 1989, s.v. boron, n., borax, n., boracium, n.

Image credit: James L. Marshall, 2013. Wikimedia Commons. https://commons.wikimedia.org/wiki/File:Boron_R105.jpg Licensed under a Creative Commons Attribution-Share Alike 3.0 Unported license.

indict / indictment

First page of a 2014 US federal indictment

22 March 2023

The verb to indict and the noun indictment have, what on first blush seems like, a straightforward etymology but that in actuality is rather muddled. And, of course, like a lot of English words they have a weird spelling. The verb means to formally accuse and bring legal charges against someone for a crime, and the noun is the result of that action.

Like many legal terms, it is a borrowing from Anglo-Norman French, in this case enditer and enditement. And the legal sense appears in Anglo-Norman writing in the mid twelfth century. But that sense is unknown in Continental Old French, where the verb only means to write, indicate, make known, or instruct. These non-legal senses are also found in Anglo-Norman, but the legal sense appears to be unique to Britain. The French words are from the Latin verb dictare, meaning to say or declare.

It's clear the legal sense developed in Britain among the Norman overlords, who of course administered just following the Conquest. But the more general senses, those found on the Continental Old French, do not appear in extant Anglo-Norman writing until the thirteenth century. One might conclude that the legal sense appeared first in Britain, but the precedent in the written record is probably due to the fact that legal records have been preserved better than other writing. The more general senses were all probably brought across the Channel in 1066, but we just don’t have records of their early use in Britain.

Complicating things further, there is a Latin verb indictare, meaning to charge with a crime, but this word only appears in Anglo-Latin and dates to the early twelfth century. We cannot, from this distance, tell if the Anglo-Norman enditer came first and the Anglo-Latin indictare is a borrowing from that, or vice versa. The Anglo-Norman appears in the record some fifty years earlier, but that’s not conclusive. Large gaps in the records of medieval usage are common.

English use of the words is recorded in the early fourteenth century. they appear in Robert Mannyng’s poem Handlyng Synne, composed ca. 1303, in a discussion of Ten Commandments. Lines 1335–38 of the poem read:

what shul we sey of þys dytours,
Þys fals men, þa beyn sysours,
Þat, for hate, a trewman wyl endyte,
And a þefe for syluer quyte?

(What shall we say these accusers,
These false men, that are jurymen,
But for hate will indict a true man,
And for silver will free a thief.)

Later in poem (line 8913), Mannying also uses the noun endytement.

Earlier Middle English spellings follow the Anglo-Norman and Mannyng’s form, with an initial < e > and without a < c >. The Latin indictare begins to influence the English spelling in the mid fifteenth century when the < i > spelling begins to appear. And the < c > starts to be inserted in the early seventeenth century, probably by spelling reformers with too much zeal for following Latin models. It is at this point that the spellings of indict and indictment become firmly ensconced in legal writing, not to be dislodged even though they do not resemble the word’s pronunciations.

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Sources:

Anglo-Norman Dictionary, 2022, s.v., enditer, v., endite, n., enditement, n. https://anglo-norman.net/

Mannyng, Robert (Robert de Brunne). Robert of Brunne’s “Handlyng Synne” (ca. 1303), 2 vols. Frederick J. Furnivall, ed. Early English Text Society. London: K. Paul. Trench, Trübner, 1901 and 1903, lines 1335–38, 48. HathiTrust Digital Archive.

Middle English Dictionary, 2019. s.v., enditen, v., enditement, n.

Oxford English Dictionary, second edition, 1989, s.v., indict, v.1, indictment, n.

Image credit: US Department of Justice, 2014. Wikimedia Commons. Public domain image.

whore

Colored version of an illustration of the Whore of Babylon that appeared in Martin Luther’s 1534 translation of the Bible

22 March 2023

Whore is an old word, and its core meaning, that of a prostitute, has remained unchanged from its Old English origin, although it has acquired a few supplementary senses along the way. The Old English hore is inherited from a Proto-Germanic root, and the word has cognates throughout the Germanic languages. Its Proto-Indo-European forbear is *ka, which carried a sense of desire, the same root that gives us caress, charity, cherish, and Kamasutra.

The Old English hore appears as a gloss to Aldhelm’s prose De virginitate (Regarding Virgins) in a passage about the fourth-century Christian martyr Daria. She had been a Vestal Virgin who converted to Christianity and was subsequently forced to live as a prostitute because under Roman law virgins could not be executed. In telling the tale in the opening years of the eighth century, Aldhelm writes “ista ad prostibula scortorum et meretricum contubernia truditur” (She is driven to the brothels of prostitutes and the concubinage of whores). Much later, an Old English hand has glossed the word meretricum (of prostitutes/courtesans) as horena

Extract from Cambridge, Trinity College MS B.15.34, p. 270, showing the interlinear gloss of fulan horen & byccan (foul whores and bitches) for fracodan myltestran (wicked prostitutes)

By the twelfth century, whore had acquired another, more general sense of a sexually promiscuous woman and was used as a term of abuse. It appears in another gloss, this time in a manuscript of homilies by Ælfric of Eynsham, where Ælfric’s original, late tenth-century fracodan myltestran (wicked prostitutes) is glossed with fulan horan & byccan (foul whores & bitches). The context here is not one of sex work, so whore is not to be taken literally. The word miltestre (prostitute) would disappear from the language by the end of the twelfth century, so the glossator was probably substituting a term that would be more familiar to the sermon’s audience and adding the editorial bitch for emphasis. (This instance is also the first known use of bitch as a term of abuse for a woman, cf. bitch)

Whore would also acquire a sense of something generally sinful or idolatrous, most famously in the phrase Whore of Babylon. This sense appears in a Wycliffite translation of Revelation 17:1 from c. 1384:

And oon of the seuene aungels cam, that hadde seuene viols: and spake with me, seide, come thou; I schal schewe to thee the dampnacioun of the greet hoore that sitteth on many watris.

Again, the Latin Vulgate has meretrices in this this passage. The original Greek is πόρνης (pórnis, prostitute).

The verb to whore makes a single appearance in the fourteenth century in the text of the Ancrene Riwle, a manual for anchoresses, where it is used to mean to commit adultery, with a metaphor of being unfaithful to Christ. But it does not appear again in the extant literature until the mid sixteenth century, when it becomes firmly established.

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Sources:

Ælfric. “Sermo ad populum in octavis Pentecosten dicendus” (Sermon to the People on the Octaves of Pentecost). In John C. Pope, Homilies of Ælfric: A Supplementary Collection, vol. 1 of 2. Early English Text Society 259, London: Oxford UP, 1967, 436. Cambridge, Trinity College MS B.15.34, p. 270.

Aldhelm. De virginitate. In Rudolf Ehwald, ed. Aldhelmi Opera. Monumenta Germaniae Historica (MGH Auct. Ant. 15). Berlin: Weidmannos, 1919, 279–80. Digital MGH.

Dictionary of Old English, A to I, 2018, s.v. hore, n.

The English Hexapla: Exhibiting the Six Important English Translations of the New Testament Scriptures. London: Samuel Bagster, 1848(?), 1246. HathiTrust Digital Archive.

Middle English Dictionary, 2019, s.v., hor(e, n.2, miltestre, n.

Oxford English Dictionary, third edition, June 2020, s.v., whore, n., whore v.

Image credits:

Whore of Babylon: Workshop of Lucas Cranach, 1534. Wikimedia Commons. Public domain image.

Cambridge, Trinity College MS B.15.34, licensed under a Creative Commons Attribution-NonCommercial 4.0 International License.

Uranus

Uranus, imaged by the Hubble space telescope

20 March 2023

[22 March 2023: clarified the history of the pronunciation]

Uranus is the seventh planet and the first to be recognized as such in modern times. It is at the limits of human vision and can only be seen with the naked eye by keen observers in near-perfect conditions. Over the centuries it was observed multiple times, but because its orbital period is 84 years it was not recognized as a planet until the late eighteenth century.

In 128 BCE, the astronomer Hipparchos may have observed it and entered it into his star catalog. But it was definitely observed by John Flamsteed in 1690, who catalogued it as a star and labeled 34 Tauri. Other astronomers after Flamsteed also recorded it as a star.

The first to recognize that what would come to be called Uranus was not a star was English astronomer William Herschel, who observed it on 13 and 17 March 1781 and, seeing that the object had moved between those two dates, mistook it for a comet. He announced his discovery of the “comet” to the Royal Society on 26 April 1781. The following year, astronomers Anders Johan Lexell and Johann Elert Bode independently determined that the object’s orbital trajectory meant that it was a planet, not a comet.

Realizing his mistake and that he had discovered a new planet, Herschel decided to call it Georgium Sidus (George’s Star), after King George III. The Latinate name appears in A New Review of November 1782:

The observations of all the first astronomers of Europe concurring to prove the new star discovered by Mr. Herschel to be a primary planet, he, who, as the discoverer, has the best right to give it a name, wishes it to be called the Georgium Sidus, in honour of the Prince under whose reign it was discovered, and as a debt due to that Prince by Astronomy, for taking the discoverer from a mechanical employment, end enabling him to continue to enrich science.

Herschel described his naming process in a letter to naturalist Joseph Banks, which was published in the Philosophical Transactions of the Royal Society in 1783:

This consideration then makes it necessary to give it a name, by which it may be distinguished from the rest of the planets and fixed stars. In the fabulous ages of ancient times the appellations of Mercury, Venus, Mars, Jupiter, and Saturn, were given to the planets, as being the names of their principal heroes and divinities. In the present more philosophical æra, it would hardly be allowable to have recourse to the same method, and call on Juno, Apollo, Pallas, or Minerva, for a name to our new heavenly body. The first consideration in any particular event, or remarkable incident, seems to be its chronology: if in any future age it should be asked, when this last-found planet was discovered? It would be a very satisfactory answer to say, “In the reign of King George the Third.” As a philosopher then, the name of Georgium Sidus presents itself to me, as an appellation which will conveniently convey the information of the time and country where and when it was brought to view.

But in the meantime, Bode had dubbed the planet Uranus, after the father of Saturn in classical mythology. In 1784, Bode wrote:

Bereits in der am 12ten März 1782 bei der hiesigen naturforschenden Gesellschaft vorgelesenen Abhandlung, habe ich den Namen des Vaters vom Saturn, nemlich Uranos, oder wie er mit der lateinischen Endung gewöhnlicher ist, Uranus vorgeschlagen, und habe seit dem das Vergnügen gehabt, daß verschiedene Astronomen und Mathematiker in ihren Schriften oder in Briefen an mich, diese Benennung aufgenommen oder gebilligt.

(Previously in the treatise read at the local natural history society on 12th March 1782, I have proposed the name of the father of Saturn, that is Uranos, or as it is usually with the Latin suffix, Uranus, and since then I have had the pleasure of various astronomers and mathematicians, in their writings or letters to me, recording or approving this designation.)

Uranus quickly became the standard name throughout Europe, with only Britain, for obvious reasons, opting for Georgium Sidus. The name Georgium Sidus remained in regular British use until the mid nineteenth century, when long after George III’s death, the British astronomical establishment finally bowed to the inevitable and went along with the nomenclature everyone else was using.

Regarding the pronunciation of the planet’s name, in Greek (and classical Latin, which follows the Greek) the stress is on the first syllable. The traditional English pronunciation, however, which is presumably modeled after the pronunciation of Latin adjectives ending in -anus, as in Romanus or paganus, places the emphasis on the second syllable: /jʊˈreɪnəs/. But to avoid the inevitable laughter of schoolchildren, and those adults with minds like schoolchildren, nowadays it is often pronounced with the emphasis on the first syllable and a shift in the second vowel to a schwa: /ˈjʊrənəs/. But the original pronunciation is also problematic in that the first two syllables are pronounced like the word urine. Perhaps the only solution is Futurama’s:

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Sources:

Bode, Johann Elert. Von dem neu entecten Planeten. Berlin: 1784, 88. Google Books.

Herschel, William. “Account of a Comet” (26 April 1781). Philosophical Transactions of the Royal Society, 71, Part 1 (1781) 492. HathiTrust Digital Archive.

———. “On the Name of the New Planet.” Philosophical Transactions of the Royal Society, 73 (1783) 1. In Philosophical Transactions (abridged), vol. 15 (1781–85). London: C. and R. Baldwin, 1809, 325. HathiTrust Digital Archive.

A New Review, November 1782, 438. Adam Matthew: Eighteenth Century Journals.

Oxford English Dictionary, third edition, March 2012, s.v. Uranus, n., Georgium Sidus, n.

Photo credit: NASA/Space Telescope Science Institute, 2009. Public domain image.

Video credit: Groening, Matt (creator), “A Big Piece of Garbage,” Futurama, Season 1, Episode 8, 11 May 1999. Fair use of a brief clip to illustrate the topic under discussion.