Comment by GavinMcG
14 hours ago
> Melanoheliophobia
Tangential, but this being a nearly word-for-word translation of “black hole fear” made me realize how odd it is that we insist on latinizing these things.
14 hours ago
> Melanoheliophobia
Tangential, but this being a nearly word-for-word translation of “black hole fear” made me realize how odd it is that we insist on latinizing these things.
Helio- is actually "sun", not "hole", and it's Greek, not Latin, but I 100% agree with you: it's pointless technical vocabulary that only serves to obfuscate. I think in this particular case, it's just some internet neologism (which is a good word, since coinage can mean a couple different things), made based on analogies with older phobias. For those of us who know Latin and Greek, though, all we can really do is shrug at the eagerness to make the clumsiest words possible.
My headcanon is that the neologism was coined by Vicky Karayiannis, widow of Chris Cornell.
https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Chris_Cornell#Personal_life
The modern Greek terms for "black hole" are:
μαύρη τρύπα or μελανή οπή
https://el.wikipedia.org/wiki/%CE%9C%CE%B1%CF%8D%CF%81%CE%B7...
helio- cannot mean "star" in a generic way but invariably refers to our own Sun. If referring to some other star, then we use aster-.
The translation of the name appears to be intended as “black star fear”.
With the "black star" being the name for "black hole" back when they were purely theoretical idea.
What would be the correct latin/greek word for it?
Melanotrypophobia, although the Greek term is "mayri trypa", literally "black hole".
3 replies →
Hypochondriac
I've also wondered the same thing about healthcare and other fields. All the complex sounding phrases are child-like in simplicity in their "native" tongue, yet completely indecipherable to most people in modern times. Quite a weird and undesirable path we ended up going down through inertia.
It’s arguable whether it’s weird or undesirable. There are benefits to using unusual words when they have precise scientific or other technical meaning. It helps identify them as terms of art, so that they’re not confused with their native tongue equivalent, which invariably has much looser meanings.
Sure, but I think there's some cause/effect to consider there. The same logic would have applied in Ancient Rome, but I expect that people would have likely been less casual with their usage of such terms when they also had specific technical meanings.
For example many food dishes we have retain basic naming conventions, yet have well understood meaning. In the US a customer ordering spaghetti is likely to be quite unhappy if they get a cream sauce, even though the order itself is literally just the name of the noodle.
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It's useful to search for the same thing and get results in different languages
I’ve long considered medical jargon to be Latin Buffyspeak[1] because it’s usually just describing the body part, often simplistically, but in Latin so it sounds fancy.
[1] https://tvtropes.org/pmwiki/pmwiki.php/Main/BuffySpeak