Really Big Numbers

I’ve been thinking about the contrast between knowledge (Latin scientia) and wisdom (Latin sapientia), and I was interested to learn that the Latin verb sciō, meaning “I know” is related to a Greek verb meaning “to cut.” When I think about science, we really do cut things up and down constantly. So I was interested to read the terms petabyte and petaflop in Reality Is Broken by Jane McGonigal. When I checked the etymology of petabyte in the Oxford English Dictionary, I found a handy explanation of some of the big number prefixes that are making their way into English, prefixes like tera-, peta, and exa-, all of which come from the Greek prefixes tetra-, penta, and hexa-, standing for four, five, and six, respectively. The prefix peta-, as I understand it, stands for a quadrillion.  What does a quadrillion have to do with “five”? A quadrillion is a thousand million million or ten to the fifteenth power, as in ten to the third power raised to the fifth power.  A petaflop, as explained in Reality Is Broken (p. 239), is “one quadrillion floating point operations per second (FLOPS).” Yi!

As we listen to our lawmakers and political candidates throw around dollar terms (millions, billions, trillions), I guess we should still count our blessings that we are not close to quadrillions in debt.

Mythological Asteroids

Way back in July of 2011 I clipped an article from the Associated Press on an asteroid that runs ahead of Earth as the planet rolls around the sun. At the end of the short article was this sentence which caught my eye and imagination: "Asteroids are giant space rocks that orbit the sun, and ones that share an orbit with a planet are called Trojans."

Hmmm...now why would asteroids orbiting with planets be called Trojans? A quick trip around the internet, and I discovered that two groups of asteroids circling with the planet Jupiter were given names of soldiers who fought in the Trojan war, one group of Trojan soldiers and one group of Greek warriors. Now asteroids orbiting with any planet go by the name of Trojans. Astronomers are so inventive, but apparently not always correct. Check out the two naming mistakes, one in each of the camps, here.

One more thing: the ending -oid on the word asteroid is a good Greek root to know. Related to the word eidos meaning "form,"-oid means "resembling, like." Words containing this Greek root include anthropoid, celluloid, humanoid, android, etc. An asteroid resembles a star, from the Greek aster meaning "star," source of, among other words, our English asterisk, astrolabe, astronaut, and astronomy.

Venus and Artemis

The January 2012 cover of The Field magazine from England featured a young woman dressed in a short tweed skirt carrying a walking stick and flanked by two dogs. The article on the inside of the magazine was called “Ladies Picking Up,” or ladies using dogs trained to retrieve birds shot by a hunter.  The image called to mind the description by Vergil in Aeneid, Book 1, of his mother, the goddess Venus, disguised as a huntress:

318            namque umerīs dē mōre habilem suspenderat arcum

319            vēnātrīx dederatque comam diffundere ventīs,

320            nūda genū nōdōque sinūs collēcta fluentīs.

[For down from her shoulders according to custom she had hung a handy bow,

and the huntress had given her hair to pour out in the winds,

bare as to her knee and having been gathered as to her flowing folds.]

On the back cover of the magazine was an advertisement for a new model of a Rizzini shot gun called...”Artemis, a perfect combination of elegance and excellence.”  Artemis is the Greek name of the huntress goddess known in Latin as Diana. The classical tradition continues in words and pictures in The Field magazine.

Michelin, the Tire That Drinks Obstacles!

Reading a cooking article in a recent NewYork Times Magazine, I learned about Simon Hopkinson, founding chef in 1987 of a restaurant in London called Bibendum. Of course, the name of the restaurant caught my Latin eye, as the word bibendum recalls the opening words of the poet Horace’s famous ode (I.37) on the death of Cleopatra:

            nunc est bibendum, nunc pede libero

pulsanda tellus, nunc Saliaribus

ornare pulvinar deorum

tempus erat dapibus, sodales.

[Now it must be drunk, now with a free foot the earth must be struck, now, friends, was the time to honor the sacred couch of the gods with priestly feasts.] The poem becomes much more complex, but the opening words are frequently quoted on wine coasters, cocktail napkins, and in other convivial contexts. 

But I also learned that the building in which the restaurant Bibendum opened was the 1911 Michelin Building, and another reference to the word bibendum revealed itself: the famous Michelin man has a name, and it is... Bibendum! On the Michelin website there is a fascinating little excerpt from an old film explaining how the Michelin man took shape in April of 1898 AND how he received the name Bibendum. You can watch it here, but you may also wish to check out more Bibendum history at the Michelin website. The text of the film is in French, but you can clearly see the drawing of a portly man enjoying a good drink under the Latin heading Nunc est bibendum! The artist signed as O'Galop, but his name was--mirabile scriptu--Marius Rossilon. 

Time to rejoice in the inventive imagination of the classically-influenced advertising artist!

A Large Chariot on a Hot, Sunny Day

During a lull in the Memorial Day procession in my little town, traffic  was allowed through, and a very large RV bearing the brand name Phaeton drove past me.   Here you can see the very amusing introductory page of this amazing motorhome and enjoy a Latin frisson in the text.  Also amusing was the vehicle following the Phaeton, a truck pulling a motorboat with a large Mercury engine.

Phaethon, the son of Helios, god of the sun, wanted to drive his father's chariot, i.e., the sun, across the sky for a day, but alas, the horses sensed a beginner at the reins. The poet Ovid tells Phaethon's story in Metamorphoses at the end of Book 1 and into Book 2. Early automobile designers gave Phaethon’s name, with the slight spelling change, to a style of sedan, and the name persisted throughout the twentieth century into the twenty-first; Volkswagen makes a model called a Phaeton. But to my eye the Chrysler Phaeton 1997 concept car definitely shares some of the glory of the chariot of the sun. See it here.

Hercules, The Dynamic City on the Bay

I read in this morning’s edition of the Halifax Chronicle Herald that a Rembrandt drawing, stolen from a San Francisco hotel, had been recovered from a church near Hercules, California. Hercules? I did a quick search to find out whence Hercules, CA received its name and was amused to discover that Hercules, CA is a town founded by the California Powder Works, makers of explosives; apparently one of its products was called Hercules, presumably because it was as effective as the demi-god Hercules (also known as Heracles in Greek mythology) at blasting things apart. Remembering how Hercules cleaned the filthy Augean stables by diverting two rivers to flow through the building, I guess Hercules is a good brand name for dynamite.

Ghosts from the Past

Walking my dog Buddy along the road in rural Nova Scotia, I noticed wild cranberries and blueberries growing and then I saw Indian pipes, a plant first identified for me by my father when I was a child. I see them rarely, but after a little research discovered that they do occur regularly in Nova Scotia woods. The scientific classification for this odd plant is monotropa uniflora, a wonderful combination of both Greek and Latin roots. Greek mono is one, and tropa means a turning; Latin uni is one, and flora is flowered. These two words describe the appearance of the little plant, each stalk of which contains a single, down-turned flower. The common names for this plant are a little frightening, and include ghost flower and corpse plant. Almost any article you read about Indian pipes is FULL of scientific terminology derived from Greek and Latin. Here is one from the U.S. Forest Service.