asaph hall and two moons i would not go anywhere near

January 29, 2016 11:36 AM

"Unlike the names of almost every celestial body in the solar system, the names of the moons of Mars are words. They’re names, but they’re words as well.", Fortunato Salazar
posted by the man of twists and turns (39 comments total)

i don't understand :( how is this different to titan, or rhea, or ganymede, or neptune, or pluto or ...

help a poor scientist out... is it that they are more closely associated with common adjectives?

(it's "words" i am having trouble with. perhaps being too literal?).
posted by andrewcooke at 11:43 AM on January 29, 2016

So:

The names Phobos and Deimos are poetic forms of "panic/dread" and "terror/fear," and the connotation is lost on all us poor philistines who don't read Greek, even though the guy who named the moons got it.

(Frankly, Phobos and Deimos always had a diabolical sound to me, but that probably owes to many hours playing DOOM).
posted by zchyrs at 11:58 AM on January 29, 2016 [5 favorites]

One of my students got into this thing of italicising one word in a sentence, it made no sense to me. This writer does it also; what is this about?
posted by biffa at 12:02 PM on January 29, 2016

I note, rudely, that "moon" is also a word with extra meanings.
posted by surlyben at 12:06 PM on January 29, 2016 [6 favorites]

Phobos and Deimos were mythological figures, but their cataloged titles also directly describe emotive feelings.

While names Phobos and Deimos (Phobus and Deimus) actually translate to Fear(some) and Terror(Terrible), in legend that was meant to serve as inferred titles, due to their birthright from otherworldly nobility. As divine children, they were to be held in awe by mortals, as the gods expected no less.
posted by Smart Dalek at 12:06 PM on January 29, 2016 [1 favorite]

This essay reminds me of when I was a kid, and I was just SO AMAZED to discover that the name Darth Vader looks like "dark father", and I had to tell everybody because nobody else could ever have noticed that before.

I'M the only smart one!
posted by branduno at 12:14 PM on January 29, 2016 [7 favorites]

Wait a minute, wait, wait (looks at the author's name) "Fortunato Salazar"? Where have I heard that name before...

Oh yeah! That same guy has talked about this before (Guardian link). When I read that Guardian article, I thought it was a joke? Like, an obviously stupid joke where the writer is some kind of nutty character who the reader is supposed to assume is crazy.

Now I think that he is legitimately obsessed with and somehow upset by the moons of Mars, and is not going to rest until everybody is as upset as he is.
posted by branduno at 12:22 PM on January 29, 2016 [5 favorites]

mercury, mars, earth, moon, titan, rhea, pan, pandora, calypso, puck and your anus are all perfectly good uncapitalized words (among others).
posted by dances_with_sneetches at 12:26 PM on January 29, 2016 [3 favorites]

Yeah, I'm not getting this one either. Phobos and Deimos followed Mars into battle. They were twins. They were Mars's child. It makes sense to name the two moons after them.

Well, Formido and Timor would be better names, I suppose, since the planet is Mars, not Ares.
posted by miguelcervantes at 12:26 PM on January 29, 2016 [3 favorites]

Those names are totally badass and entirely appropriate for companions of the god of war.

The author is right, I read the Iliad in English and I had no idea what those words meant.
posted by foobaz at 12:26 PM on January 29, 2016

The major satellites of Jupiter, for example, are named after figures in mythology whom Jupiter bedded, or after the descendants of Jupiter and those bedded figures. The major satellites of Saturn are named after the Hesiodic Titans, who are siblings of the Hesiodic Kronos—the Roman god Saturn is derived from, or identified with, the Greek god Kronos. In Hesiod, the Titans are primordial and daunting, but they aren’t in any sense malefactors. Moreover, and critically, the names of Titans assigned to the moons of Saturn function only as names, not as words. They don’t disguise words that have a whole separate set of connotations. The same is true for Jupiter: moons with names of benign deities whose names are only names, not words (with the aforementioned exception of Ananke, “necessity.”) ... The upshot is that Mars stands out because of the peculiar status of its moons’ names.

Well Phobos and Deimos are, appropriately enough, Ares's children. Here's some other children of Ares: Nemesis, Harmonia, and Eros. I'm no Greek scholar, but I am enough of a linguist to be hella skeptical that more of other planets' moons' names aren't also ancient Greek words. *searchy search search* Yeah, it looks like the Greeks named their gods and titans literally all the time: Metis, Callisto, Hyperion.

This is all over the place in Greek mythology. Nyx meant night. Hera is literally the feminine form of "protector". Gaia was a form of Ge, meaning Earth. But it's not just the Greeks, for sure. Neil Gaiman's Endless are named Dream, Death, Destruction, &c. Our modern personification of time is named ... Father Time.

(Frankly, Phobos and Deimos always had a diabolical sound to me, but that probably owes to many hours playing DOOM).

I'm pretty sure that's the reason they chose that location for UAC's research station.
posted by aubilenon at 12:27 PM on January 29, 2016 [2 favorites]

I think this guy is making a lot of soup out of not-very-much meat. There's a long tradition of giving names of deities and things from myth to astronomic bodies, and for the names of moons to be related to their parent body if possible.

Pluto is the Roman name for the king of the underworld. Pluto's moon is named Charon, which is the Roman name for the ferryman that takes souls to the underworld.

Eris was named for the Greek God of discord, because it was expected that Eris would cause trouble in astronomic circles -- as indeed it did, leading to a redefinition of "planet" and the demotion of Pluto to "dwarf planet".

Eris has a moon, named Dysnomia. In mythology, Dysnomia was the daughter of Eris and the goddess of lawlessness.

These names are not coincidences; they're the result of a deliberate policy among astronomers. (Plus, in the case of Eris, a certain sardonic humor.)
posted by Chocolate Pickle at 12:27 PM on January 29, 2016 [2 favorites]

obsessed with and somehow upset by the moons of Mars

Yeah the writing doesn't seem to be heading towards anywhere, it just picks up mass, orbiting around some point he dares not get close to.

Not a criticism, given the topic.
posted by otherchaz at 12:38 PM on January 29, 2016 [1 favorite]

. . . all perfectly good uncapitalized words

I believe the word you're looking for is "cromulent."
posted by The Bellman at 12:50 PM on January 29, 2016 [2 favorites]

That being said, there's a great GIF of the two moons that makes them look menacing.
posted by miguelcervantes at 1:04 PM on January 29, 2016

And here's a picture of Phobos that makes it look like a baked potato.
posted by benito.strauss at 1:36 PM on January 29, 2016 [2 favorites]

Yeah, noticing that Phobos and Deimos really aren't unique this way really mars his thesis.
posted by straight at 1:41 PM on January 29, 2016 [9 favorites]

It doesn't seem to be one of his Ares of expertise.
posted by benito.strauss at 1:43 PM on January 29, 2016 [8 favorites]

So... there are no leather goddesses there?

Cancel the space program.
posted by innocentsabored at 2:01 PM on January 29, 2016 [2 favorites]

Wow, this just seemed academic and kind of interesting, but then it went further and further off the deep end and I stopped reading. And this guy's Guardian editorial, linked above, blew my mind: Before we set up colonies on Mars, we need to discuss renaming its moons.. Really? That's so beyond a first-world problem that I don't even know what to call it.

That one really goes off the deep end:

We really should be worrying not just about the colonists of the near-future, but the welfare of future generations. What about the future generations who stay home, here on Earth, soaking up Mars’s two moons’ baleful vibes?

And apropos of baleful vibes, what about the damage we’ve done to the moons by naming them so unflatteringly? A new finding suggests that, in a mere 50m years, the larger of the moons will tear itself apart into zillions of chunks of orbiting rubble. A planetary geoscientist would argue that Phobos is feeling the strain of Martian gravity, but I wouldn’t be so sure. In the course of 50m years, Phobos will be soaking up a lot of baleful vibes. Do we really want future generations to be witnessing a nearby moon disintegrating into rubble and wondering, Did we do that?

I have to assume he's making some kind of incredibly literate and intelligent hilarious joke and it just isn't coming through to my puny human brain.

I looked up the author and found that his earlier writing was for McSweeney's. So I may not be wrong about that.
posted by mmoncur at 2:58 PM on January 29, 2016

I find it strange that the author is so offended by the names of the moons, but seemingly not at all concerned with the name of the planet itself. Surely if "Terror" is an unsettling name, "War" is too.

I'd like to propose new names: the planet Martha and her moons Phoebe and Deidre.
posted by foobaz at 3:21 PM on January 29, 2016 [3 favorites]

Mars is such a war-like name. Call it something more appealing to settlers, like they did for Greenland. I propose "Planet Freedom".
posted by sfenders at 3:57 PM on January 29, 2016

Just wait until they discover the next few hundred dwarf planets I seem to remember Neil Degrasse Tyson predicting. Some day they will run out of obscure deities, and start naming them like tech startups.
posted by sfenders at 4:03 PM on January 29, 2016 [1 favorite]

I'd like to propose new names: the planet Martha and her moons Phoebe and Deidre.

Nice try, but the name Phoebe is already taken by one of Saturn's moons.
posted by aubilenon at 4:08 PM on January 29, 2016 [1 favorite]

I think this guy is making a lot of soup out of not-very-much meat. There's a long tradition of giving names of deities and things from myth to astronomic bodies, and for the names of moons to be related to their parent body if possible.

Pluto is the Roman name for the king of the underworld. Pluto's moon is named Charon, which is the Roman name for the ferryman that takes souls to the underworld.

He acknowledges and discusses this in the linked article. He further notes that Pluto's name was suggested by the granddaughter of the man who suggested the names of Phobos and Deimos. He even defines a pattern to which all these other danger-and-chaos names adhere, but to which Phobos and Deimos do not.
posted by mwhybark at 4:57 PM on January 29, 2016 [1 favorite]

This reads a little bit like it was published by a Lovecraft character mid-story, where the dark discovery has been made but the madness hasn't set in quite yet. Hopefully he's just enjoying a mental workout and not, you know, on the run from martian fish men or something.

As a kid, the science lesson where I learned about the moons of Mars was a kind of funny little rollercoaster of sympathies. Mars got TWO moons. Awesome! They're crummy little asteroids that don't have the mass to spin themselves circular. Lame. So they look kinda like potatoes. Funny! They're named Phobos and Deimos, the fear and chaos that follow War's wake. Rad!

I always anthropomorphized everything. I guess I still do. The impression I came away with was that I rooted for them, these wimpy little celestial bodies with badass names. There's a hint of destiny around a thing like that, I think. Grabbed my imagination in a way more scientifically interesting moons didn't.

I can see where the author's coming from in finding their names especially important and evocative, is what I'm saying. I get the feeling I saw the same thing he did at some point, but where I saw a humor in the unique juxtaposition, he sees something really sinister.
posted by Phobos the Space Potato at 5:37 PM on January 29, 2016 [2 favorites]

Obviously you are all oblivious and Greekless.
posted by Aiwen at 5:41 PM on January 29, 2016 [1 favorite]

All the Greek gods are the god of the thing and the thing.

Aphrodite/Venus is the anthropomorphic goddess of erotic love, but she's also erotic love itself.
posted by Trochanter at 6:00 PM on January 29, 2016

If we don't rename them over there, we'll have to rename them over here!
posted by blue_beetle at 6:02 PM on January 29, 2016

Curiosity Sticks Her Toes in a Martian Sand Dune, Takes a Selfie
posted by homunculus at 6:41 PM on January 29, 2016 [1 favorite]

I feel like this is one long and very obtuse Doom joke.
posted by dazed_one at 5:03 AM on January 30, 2016

All the Greek gods are the god of the thing and the thing.

Aphrodite/Venus is the anthropomorphic goddess of erotic love, but she's also erotic love itself.

Is this true in the way he means it here? Does "Venus" in Greek ever get used, as a word, to simply describe erotic love, without reference to the deity? Is "Venus" a word like "pestilence" in English, which is both a noun and also a proper noun in the context of the "Four Horsemen" mythology?
posted by howfar at 6:52 AM on January 30, 2016

Is this true in the way he means it here?

No.
posted by tivalasvegas at 8:15 AM on January 30, 2016

Yeah. He's right. Hektor really screws up the day for a lot of guys.

So, Hows about drawing instead from contemporary mythology?

Disney? We can call them Pluto and Goofy, orbiting around Mickey.

No, wait, Pluto has already been taken. How about Donald? (The duck, not the clown.)
posted by mule98J at 9:19 AM on January 30, 2016

Is this true in the way he means it here?

No.

Yeah, though you would say Aphrodite made a guy fall in love, and mean the impulse, it would also inextricably be bound with the deity.
posted by Trochanter at 9:53 AM on January 30, 2016

Aphrodite/Venus is the anthropomorphic goddess of erotic love, but she's also erotic love itself.

Oh yeah, then what's Eros?
posted by aubilenon at 10:41 AM on January 30, 2016

Oh yeah, then what's Eros?

Right, there's overlap and contradictions. A lot of tales from a lot of eras and places.
posted by Trochanter at 11:11 AM on January 30, 2016

Right...but as I understand it, the point being made in the article is that the deities (Phobos, Deimos) are relatively obscure or at least minor, whereas the words behind their names (phobos, deos) are very common in Greek and have very unpleasant connotations.

We Greekless readers don't have a full appreciation of the connotations because...we're Greekless. We're oblivious because we're Greekless.

The difference for Eros (again as I understand it, as a layperson) is that Eros is the name of a major deity and also a common word (with pleasant connotations).

I was impressed by the article and liked the way it interwove various interesting threads not usually found together--from Greek lit, linguistics, astronomy, history of astronomy.
posted by dana farber at 11:42 AM on January 30, 2016 [1 favorite]

Eros is weird because, in Theogony, he exists in creation immediately post Chaos. He's one of the first three things to exist -- at least two "generations" before Aphrodite -- and yet he later (I think it's later -- Hesiod was pretty early.) appears as Aphrodite's son, the adolescent boy, or the infant, as the Romans had it.

Total layperson here too, though.

But the earlier incarnation he was not so much about romance and eroticism. More about procreation, or even just creation. The coming together of things to make new things and the drive to come together.
posted by Trochanter at 12:21 PM on January 30, 2016 [1 favorite]