Visit theallusionist.org/cosmic-hairball to listen to this episode and get more information about the topics therein.
This is the Allusionist, in which I, Helen Zaltzman, win the participation trophy at the language contest.
Today’s episode contains a lot of etymologies to do with space, so pack your oxygen tank and freeze-dried ice cream.
After this, the show will be on a break, returning early April 2026, because I’ve got to stock up on allusional ideas and interviews and read a bunch of books, and also figure out how to keep the show alive when the podcast ad market is coughing up dust - thanks so much to all of you who donate to the show via theallusionist.org/donate, because without your contributions this show would have been sent to live on a farm upstate. Such power you can wield, from just $2 per month! Or more, if you’ve got money that you don’t want to hang onto lest it corrupts your soul.
And plenty will be going on during the break for you paying members of the Allusioverse: livestreams with me and my ever-expanding collection of weird reference books; written bonus content; the company of the Allusioverse Discord; watchalongs including the current season of Great Pottery Throwdown and some films, I think we’re going to do Chungking Express and Amma Asante’s period drama Belle; we’ve had a request for The Ice Storm too, and sure, I’ll return to that bleakness if that’s what you want. So head over to theallusionist.org/donate to get in on that, or sign up for a free account to get occasional updates via email.
On with the show.
The English language is riddled with words that are borrowed from space or influenced by space.
Eccentric, an orbit that didn’t have the Earth right at the centre. Whereas concentric does have a centre.
Ether: before it was a chemical compound, it was the substance that filled the space beyond the clouds. If you’ve been wondering what deities breathed, it was ether.
Depression: before depression meant anything mental health-related or weather systems, it was the angle of stars below the horizon. Zenith was the point of the celestial sphere directly above, and nadir its opposite.
Jovial, a characteristic influenced by the planet Jupiter, which is named after the Roman God also known as Jove, and people born under the influence of the planet have its characteristics, being jolly. Whereas to be saturnine is to be gloomy under the influence of Saturn.
Influence itself - that comes from the stars’ power over personality and the future. Influenza too, a visitation of stars that makes you feel terrible and like you’re dying for a week, thanks stars!
Disaster: that meant ill-starred – terrible things happening because the stars were not in your favour.
Stars as in famous people, stardom, starstruck - which as well as meaning ‘bowled over by a celebrity’ used to mean suffering under the baleful influence of the stars.
But it’s not just the stars out to get you, what about the moon, in words like moonstruck, and lunacy and lunatic. They thought the moon could make you physically and mentally ill - in fact Old English had a word for mental unrest, ‘menseoc’ (moonsick).
The moon is in the first syllable of menstruation and menarche - and menopause. It’s in month. It’s in honeymoon. It’s also in meniscus, something shaped like a crescent moon.
The English language took all this linguistic inspiration from space, but it wasn’t an equal exchange, because what we gave back, the language we put onto space, is not really doing the best job at putting the sublime into words. A lot of it just seems to be looking around the house and thinking, “Oh, this thing looks a bit like that thing in space, let’s give it the same name – good enough!”
Crater - well crater’s quite fun, a party etymology: a crater was a mixing bowl, specifically a big bowl in Ancient Greece used for mixing water with wine, because Ancient Greek wine was very acidic and very strong so they needed to water it down.
The person in charge of the wine mix, and the refills, was called the symposiarch, meaning the Lord of the Communal Drink, that’s where we get the word symposium from, which originally meant a boozy party, what we’d call in British English a piss-up.
Then around 400 years ago the word ‘crater’ got applied to volcanoes, you can see how someone might look at one and think, “Bet we could mix a lot of spritzers in that!” And then in the 1800s when they were looking at the moon and noticing it had a lot of big round divots in it, they thought those were volcanoes, so called them ‘craters’. So that’s why some craters are volcanoes and some are just a big dent.
Anyway, they applied a familiar concept to something far away, which is also what they did with ‘orbit’. Orbit is the eye socket. Just like the eye socket goes around the eye, the planets go round the sun.
‘Orbit’ may have come from from a Latin word for the ruts left in the ground by a wheel, a disputed origin, but if it is true, it is perhaps the etymology most enacting the line in Oscar Wilde’s play Lady Windermere’s Fan: “We are all in the gutter, but some of us are looking at the stars.”
So I was disappointed by ‘orbit’, but shouldn’t have spent my etymological disappointment all at once. Because I should have saved some for comets.
What name would suit comets, which were considered very powerful – historically, pretty much all cultures believed comets were terrible omens, that kings would die and harvests would fail and catastrophes befall the people and gods were attacking the Earth? I can totally understand why, when comets appeared, the people of yore absolutely crapped themselves. They had some understanding of what the stars were doing, and what the planets were doing – and then some comet just prances across it all, goes away, sometimes comes BACK, all the while looking like a heavenly shotput or flaming tadpole.
Well, what the word comet meant was… ‘hair’.
MARTIN AUSTWICK sings:
It grows out of my head,
It makes my shower clog;
I don’t want to find it
In my food at a restaurant.
But you look at the sky
and see a comet speeding by,
And think, “Mm hmm, that looks like hair.”
A comet looks like a star with hair streaming out of it, is how that came to be. Maybe giving a bad omen the name ‘hair’ helped to take the fear out of it. That’s a basic CBT tactic as we learned from Dr Jane Gregory in year one of the show.
Or maybe the imagination only went as far as the scalp.
There’s another comet-head connection comes from Norse mythology, comets were formed from fragments of the skull of the giant Ymir, after the god Odin and his brothers Vili and Vé killed him and fashioned the Earth from his body, oceans from his blood and clouds from his brain.
Throughout the second half of the 20th century, a comet’s nucleus, that is the main hairball part, was known as a dirty snowball or icy dirtball, where is the romance?
Comets for a very long time were hard to explain: were they shooting stars? The shadows of planetary eclipses? Something being shoved around up there by the aforementioned ether? Were they weather?
Until the 19th century, meteors were only thought to be weather, not astronomical. And the word ‘meteor’ used to be used to refer to all sorts of things going on in the skies:
rainbows and aurorae were luminous meteors,
wind was an aerial meteor, rain or snow were aqueous meteors,
and shooting stars and lightning were igneous meteors.
Just in case any of you, like me, have to look up the difference between meteors and meteorites, here’s what it is: meteoroids are bits of rock in space, bigger than specks of dust but smaller than a metre across. Meteors are those rock bits which streak across the sky as they burn up going through the atmosphere. And meteorites are those rock bits which make it through the atmosphere and land on Earth.
The earliest known objects that humans made out of iron are some beads, found in Egypt, that were made more than 5200 years ago, and the iron they’re made from came from a meteorite. Quite incredible to think that’s how humans probably first experimented with this substance, that is so important in the history of humanity. It was there all along in the planet beneath us, but we had to wait to know it until some fell from space.
This is just so amazing to me. Unlike the etymology of the term ‘meteor’, which derives from Greek and just means “a thing that’s high up.”
MARTIN:
Flaming missiles from the gods,
Cosmic metal rain,
A star escapes the firmament
then never shines again.
But you look at the sky,
And think, “I dunno what or why,
But, it’s a high-up thing - and that’s where my curiosity ends.”
In historical Mexican astronomical lore, meteors were thought of as the gods’ cigar butts and turds. Unsightly but it has more pizzazz than “stuff that’s high up.”
OK what about the high-up thing that is variously known as:
Fire stream. Heaven’s river. Ganges of the Ether.
The way of the birds. Godfather’s straw.
The haymaker’s way. The straw-thief’s way. The way of the snake. The way of the warriors. The way of the grey goose.
The Way the Dog Ran Away.
The Deer’s Leap. Winter Street. The severed tail of a dragon.
Those are some of its names in other cultures.
WE call it…
The Milky Way. Way of the Milk.
MARTIN:
You look at the sky
And see a stream of stars go by
And think, “Yum yum yum,
That looks like milk.”
Another space-milk word is ‘galaxy’, you can’t spell galactic without lactic.
And look, inspiration is hard, I too panic if I have to name something. It’s like you think of all these funny names if you ever had a band, then when you actually have to name a band you’re like… “erm… Sabrina Woodworker?”
So I can imagine the astronomers opening up the fridge for inspiration: “Should I call it space sausage? Celestial carrot? Mayo spill? MILK, ok cool.”
MARTIN:
It comes out of a cow,
And from the teats of rats,
It sweats out of a platypus;
It even comes from bats.
And you look at the sky
And see a sea of stars go by
And you think, “Yum yum yum,
That looks like milk.
Delicious milk,
Refreshing milk,
Thirst-quenching milk.
It’s my favourite.
Milk!”
HZ: This show is brought to you by the Intergalactic Milk Marketing Board.
MARTIN:
Milky milk.
Milk milk milk milk
Milk milk milk milk
Milk.
Milk.
I wanted to tell you about a couple of projects that I thought you’d be into, by friends of the show. One is Radio Atlas which this month is celebrating its tenth birthday. It is radio documentaries and dramas and sound art from around the world, with English subtitles, so people familiar with English get to enjoy audio in other languages, and if you’re a polyglot, you can hear lots of cool stuff. The latest episode is from Croatia in 1975, with some spicy swearing. Check out Radio Atlas at radioatlas.org and in the podplaces.
And! Author Nikesh Shukla appeared on the episode The Away Team about the xenophobic language used around human migration - that episode is eight years old and never less relevant, unfortunately. Anyway, Nikesh has just published a pamphlet, about hope and fear and being active against fascism. It’s called Hope Must Be Held In A Clenched Fist, it is limited edition and available to buy from his website nikesh-shukla.com/store, I’ve ordered mine.
Your randomly selected word from the dictionary today is…
scuncheon, noun: the inside face of a door jamb or window frame.
Try using ‘scuncheon’ in an email today. And if you’re in Newfoundland, don’t get it confused with scrunchions. Big difference between door jambs and little cubes of pork fat, in my experience.
This episode was produced by me, Helen Zaltzman, on the unceded ancestral and traditional territory of the xʷməθkʷəy̓əm (Musqueam), Sḵwx̱wú7mesh (Squamish), and səlilwətaɬ (Tsleil-Waututh) Nations.
The score and singing is by Martin Austwick, hear his songs via palebirdmusic.com and Bandcamp – but not Spotify, because evil; use another service for your audiotainment.
This piece originated for a performance we did in the Planetarium at the H.R. MacMillan Space Centre in Vancouver BC, so thanks Michael Unger for having us, and Martin and I are available to perform at your planetariums, or arts centres or theatres or festivals or cabaret vaults, get in touch if you’d like to book some Allusionist live. We’re particularly trying to set up some shows for later this year in BC and Alberta.
Find me on Instagram, Facebook, YouTube @allusionistshow.
Our ad partner is Multitude. To sponsor this show, whereby I will talk winningly and admiringly about your product or thing, get in touch with them at multitude.productions/ads.
The show will return with new episodes in April, meanwhile you can listen to or read every episode, get more information about each episode, and see the full dictionary entries for the randomly selected words, browse a lexicon of every word featured in the show to find the episode it was in, and become a member of the Allusioverse to support the show and get a bunch of perks, all at the show’s forever home theallusionist.org.
