E G O S P E W

Homo Sapiens Elgoog & Aidepikiw

Life, Myth, and Naming Conventions

During some recent exhaustive research for an entirely unrelated subject, after hours illicitly spent with my secret nighttime lovers Elgoog & Aidepikiw [the names were changed to protect Carl & Linda], I discovered there are now SIX kingdoms of life! Not two! It’s all been reorganized out from under me, while I was busy mastering my own life’s kingdom. Back when I was in high school, it was so simple: Animalia and Plantorum, or whatever. There were some uncomfortable rumblings about viruses and people still argued over whether they possessed 48 or 46 chromosomes but generally, I walked around erect, proud to be a vertebrate.

Ah, those were the good old days . . . nine planets, no plutoids. Evolution was a science, not an optional myth. And Jupiter had an impressive but manageable twelve moons.  Pop quiz: name them! “Yeah, okay, sure . . . Europa, Io, Ego, Id . . . you know, all those Jupiter/Zeus lovers and descendants. Freud must have dreamed about getting into those heads.”

Nice try.

Well, science never sleeps.  In the past few years our giant friend, under intense government agency probing, has revealed many more secret moons — 63 total, as of today.  Yikes, where was I?

So many, in fact, that it seems the scientists ran out of names after the 49th moon discovered in 2003 (Persephone/Kore — Goddess of Spring and Stockholm Syndrome; abducted by Hades, whom she later married). Hence, authorities have now adopted the much easier J-Number provisional naming convention, e.g. “J17″, sounding like some celestial bingo game. (Why was it that even with Cerberus, Janus, and all those other polycephalic gods able to watch multiple cards simultaneously, Zeus always won?  Then as now, the church/house odds favor the Big Guy.)

If you think this dearth of available names means Zeus should’ve whored around even more, fear not. I count 92 divine and mortal results of his not being able to keep it in his fig leaf. Plus you can double that name count, what with the Greeks’ and Romans’ blatant territoriality, nomenclaturewise: ”You say Persephone and I say Persipina. You like Asklepios and I like Aesculapius . . .” What it comes down to is scientists just have serious trouble reaching consensus when it comes to lunar nomenology.

So if you’re asked to name Jovian satellites 50 through 63, you might be tempted reel off in tidy sequence “J50, J51, J52. . . .” Oh how wrong you’d be! Actually they jump around like a nebula of brawling astronomers at a naming convention: J2, J3, J4, J11, J5, J9, J10, J12, J15, J16, J17, J18, J19, J23. Sheesh, stupid scientists!

My left brain that is supposed to make order out of myth is asking me: Wouldn’t it have been so much easier for modern civilization trying to come up with names if the ancients had simply called their gods G1, G2, G3, etc.? Though maybe not so colorful.

Shut up, left brain.

Back when I was a tyke huddled around the tube with my family watching Walter Cronkite’s 20th Century of a Sunday evening, I suddenly realized that it was unlikely people called “World War I” by that name at that time, not really knowing for sure about the ensuing world wars that would be waged as humankind tried to get it right. My mother, proud of my insight, informed me that indeed the first world war had been known as “The Great War”, until, of course, we came up with another great one twenty years later and suddenly needed a naming convention. In those days, before our ubiquitous nerdly zero-origin numbering, what they devised was “World War I” and “World War II”. The alliteration felt good, the words were descriptive (if somewhat kindergartenish), the Roman numerals added a sense of gravitas deserved by the events, and the sequence made it much easier for science fiction writers to envision World War III and beyond.

But for those of you who might prefer a classical reference, one which could evoke the nature of that being named, may I propose the succinct yet expressive: HADES 1, HADES 2, HADES 3, etc. The system implies, quite neatly, that interstitial conflicts receive dot-numbers. The Korean War, for instance, could be renamed HADES 2.1, while that Peloponnesian police action back in 431 BCE becomes HADES 0.21, if you catch my drift. This approach is clearly twentieth-century-specific, with the former Great War (1917) anchoring HADES 1.0, previous conflicts taking 0.xx assignations, and the Big One, as you would expect, HADES 3.0. Luckily, after that, there will be no need for further digits of any sort. Precision, truth, and color in nomenclature.

Oh, and the six new life kingdoms are not named L0, L1, L2, L3, L4, L5. Unfortunately.