kallis@pen.DEC (02/13/86)
On the subject of plasnetary adjectives: It is perfectly true that the initial adjectives concerning planets were astrological/medicopsychological. The idea generally that the planetary influence manifested itself in personality; i.e., a person born (or whatever else put him or her) under the influence of Mars was "martial," and was a good fighter, aggressive, etc. On that basis, we got: Saturnine, jovial, martial, venereal, mercurial, and lunar. However, popular usage has given us "Jovian" for Jupitter adjective and noun (for inhabitant, hypothetical though such may be), "Martian" for Mars, "Mercurian" for mercury, and "Terrestrial" for Earth (Terra). Saturn is a bit unclear, though "Saturnian" seems to be taking hold in some quarters, and therefore, "Uranian," "Plutonian," and [dare we say it?] "Venusian" seem consistent. But why? The original meanings of some of the words as practiced as late as the Seventeenth Century have taken on personality meanings, per their original medicopsychological meanings. "Jovial" is generally associated with a good- natured person. A "saturnine" person is morose and sardonic. A "martial" thing or person is associated with military matters, "mercurial" means hard to grasp, among other things. Languages evolve to meet changing situations. Just as now "---sonic" has been sorted out since the mid 1940s (originally, "supersonic" was used to denote both "higher-pitched frequencies than humans can hear" and "speeds faster than Mach 1"; now the former is "ultrasonic"), the differentiation between that denoting characteristics of physical planets and that denoting personalities should be sufficient reason to use the "..ian" suffix. Steve Kallis, Jr.
mmar@sphinx.UChicago.UUCP (Mitchell Marks) (02/16/86)
Richard Carnes (quoting Knuth) is of course correct in pointing out that
the word 'hexadecimal' mixes a Greek and a Latin stem. But what says
that's wrong? The idea that they shouldn't be mixed was invented out of
the blue in the seventeenth century, when English was busily coining words.
--
-- Mitch Marks @ UChicago
...ihnp4!gargoyle!sphinx!mmar