3200 Phaethon

The Fall of Phaëthon on a Roman sarcophagus
 (Hermitage Museum - Wikimedia)

This week will have the best nights for watching the Geminid meteor showers which appear to come from the constellation Gemini, but these showers are caused by the celestial object 3200 Phaethon, which is an asteroid.

That is unusual and this is one of the only major meteor showers not originating from a comet. This asteroid has an orbit that brings it closer to the Sun than any other named asteroid. And that association with the Sun is how the asteroid got its name.

The first asteroids to be discovered were named for characters from classical mythology, but names are no longer restricted strictly to mythological characters.

Phaethon was the Ancient Greek name for the planet Jupiter, a planet whose motions and cycles were observed by the ancients and often used in poetry and myth.

In mythology, Phaethon's father was the sun god Helios who granted his son's wish to drive the sun chariot for a day.  Phaethon was unable to control the horses. To prevent the chariot from hitting and destroying Earth, Zeus knocked it out of the sky with a thunderbolt. Phaethon fell to earth and was killed.

These radar images of near-Earth asteroid 3200 Phaethon were generated by astronomers at the National Science Foundation's Arecibo Observatory on Dec. 17, 2017. Observations of Phaethon were conducted from Dec.15 through 19, 2017, at the time of its closest approaching December 16 when it was about 6.4 million miles or 10.3 million kilometers away, or about 27 times the distance from Earth to the moon. The encounter is the closest the asteroid will come to Earth until 2093.

Source: https://photojournal.jpl.nasa.gov/catalog/PIA22185

cisgender

I had to look up the word "cisgender" today when I saw it used in an article: "No cisgendered male can express opinions about that topic."

Cisgender (which is sometimes abbreviated to "cis") is a term to describe people whose gender identity matches the sex that they were assigned at birth.

The Latin-derived prefix cis-, means "on this side of" and can be considered the opposite of trans-, which means "on the other side of."

For example, you can say transatlantic to mean on the other side of that ocean, as in a "transatlantic ship crossing," or say "cisatlantic" to mean on this side of the Atlantic Ocean.

Despite my ignorance of the word, it has been around for awhile. German sexologist Volkmar Sigusch used the neologism cissexual (zissexuell in German) in his 1991 article "Die Transsexuellen und unser nosomorpher Blick" ("Transsexuals and our nosomorphic view") as the origin of the term.

Cisgender is a word that applies to the vast majority of people who are not transgender. Is there a need for such a word? The best parallel in our language would be homosexual and heterosexual.

You can go deeper into the sociology of this in gender studies and I suspect the word will be in wider usage in the future. There are already derivatives of the terms cisgender and cissexual include "cis male" for "male assigned male at birth", "cis female" for "female assigned female at birth" (analogously cis man and cis woman) and also cissexism and cissexual. A related adjective is "gender-normative" because "cisgendered" is used instead of the more popular "gender normative" to refer to people who "do not identify with a gender diverse experience, without enforcing existence of a normative gender expression *."

I also didn't realize that back in 2014 Facebook began offering "custom" gender options, allowing users to identify with one or more gender-related terms from a selected list, including cis, cisgender, and others.

Obelism

Obelism is the practice of annotating manuscripts with marks set in the margins. Modern obelisms are used by editors when proofreading a manuscript or typescript.

One example is the "stet." Stet is is Latin for "Let it stand," and it is used by editors or authors to mean "disregard the previous mark." Another obelism is "dele" for delete.

The word "obelus/obelos" and the symbol comes from ὀβελός, the Ancient Greek word for a sharpened stick, spit, or pointed pillar. This is the same root as that of the word "obelisk."

An obelos was placed by editors on the margins of manuscripts going all the way back to the ancient writings of Homer. They would indicate lines that were doubtfully Homer's.

Three basic variants of dotted obelos glyphs