Nicotine

Nicotine, the addictive alkaloid found in tobacco, is another of the many English eponyms of French origin. The formal name for the tobacco plant is the Latin Nicotiana tabacum, and it was named after Jean Nicot, the French ambassador to Portugal in the 1500s.

Jean Nicot de Villemain, a French diplomat and scholar became famous for being the first to bring tobacco to France, including snuff tobacco. He sent tobacco and seeds to Paris in 1560 and then presented it to the French King. He also promoted its medicinal use, since smoking was believed to protect against illness, particularly the plague.

The fashionable people of Paris began to use the plant, making Nicot a celebrity.

The plant was called Nicotina, but nicotine later came to refer specifically to the particular chemical in the plant.

Nicotiana tabacum, or cultivated tobacco, CC BY 2.5, Link

Montreal Expos

Before Major League Baseball expanded to Montreal in 1969, there were minor league teams in Montréal and they were usually named the "Royals." This was a reference to Mount Royal (French: Mont Royal), which is located west of today's downtown and after which the city was named.

The Montréal Expos (French: Les Expos de Montréal) were a Canadian professional baseball team there. They were the first Major League Baseball (MLB) franchise located outside the United States.

The Expos were named in honor of Expo 67, which was the World's Fair (exposition) held two years before the Expos began play.

They played in the National League (NL) East Division from 1969 until 2004.  They have no World Series Titles.

In 1994, a players' strike wiped out the last eight weeks of the season and all of the post-season. Montreal was in first place by six games in the National League East Division when play was stopped, but no official titles were awarded in 1994.

Their top franchise players were Gary Carter, Andre Dawson, Vladimir Guerrero, Pedro Martinez, Tim Raines, Steve Rogers, Rusty Staub, and Jose Vidro.

Following the 2004 season, the franchise relocated to Washington, D.C., and became the Washington Nationals and the "Expos" name was retired.

Montréal currently has no MLB team.  The Kansas City Royals team name has no connection to the old Montréal teams by that name.

Why name the Americas "America?"

America is named after Amerigo Vespucci, the Italian explorer. He is the man who set forth what was then considered to be a revolutionary concept: that the lands that Christopher Columbus sailed to in 1492 (but didn't actually land on) were part of a separate continent. 

A map created in 1507 by Martin Waldseemüller was the first to depict this new continent with the name "America," a Latinized version of "Amerigo."

Detail of the Waldseemüller map showing the name "America."
The Library of Congress purchased of the only known extant copy of this map
for $10 million, thanks to the generosity of the U.S. Congress, Discovery Channel, Gerald Lenfest, David Koch and several other donors.

Waldseemüller's large world map included map data that had been gathered by Vespucci during his voyages of 1501-1502 to the New World. he named the new lands "America" on his 1507 map in the recognition of Vespucci's understanding that a new continent had been discovered.

See www.loc.gov/wiseguide/aug03/america.html

Yo La Tengo

Yo La Tengo, 2010  L-R: McNew, Hubley, and Kaplan

Yo La Tengo is an American alternative rock band formed in Hoboken, New Jersey in 1984. Since 1992, the lineup has consisted of Ira Kaplan (guitars, piano, vocals), Georgia Hubley (drums, piano, vocals), and James McNew (bass, vocals).

The band has had some commercial success, but has always been known as a "critics' band" and has a devoted cult following especially in the NY/NJ area. They are known for having an incredible repertoire of cover songs in live performances and often does radio request appearances on WFMU. 

You La Tengo translates to "I have it" in Spanish. It is said to be the phrase called out by Hispanic baseball players when fielding a pop fly ball. Ira Kaplan picked up the expression from the book The Five Seasons by Roger Angell. 

 
 

Naming the Asteroids

I wrote earlier about 3200 Phaethon, the asteroid that causes us to see the Geminid meteor showers that appear in December. The first asteroids to be discovered were named for characters from classical mythology, such as Ceres and Juno. But the International Astronomical Union (IAU) now regulates the naming of asteroids, and names are no longer restricted to only mythological characters.

The naming of heavenly bodies and celestial objects is quite interesting. An article from the Open University, says that an asteroid is not awarded a name until it has been observed long enough for its orbit to be determined with a fair degree of precision, which may take several years.

The “permanent designation” is a rather boring number issued in strict numerical sequence, but the discoverer is invited to suggest a name for approval by a special committee of the International Astronomical Union.

As we begin to be able to land on these asteroids, the idea of mining asteroids becomes less science-fiction and more like an actual space industry.

There are some much more unusual or whimsical names.

7758 Poulanderson is named after a science fiction author Poul Anderson.

I quite like that object 8749 is named "Beatles" after best known of all rock bands. In addition to 8749 Beatles, there are four consecutively numbered minor planets named after the individual members of The Beatles:

• 4147 Lennon (John Lennon)
• 4148 McCartney (Paul McCartney)
• 4149 Harrison (George Harrison)
• 4150 Starr (Ringo Starr)

The Beatles are not alone in being pop musicians with celestial objects bearing their names. Elvis, Frank Zappa, Jerry Garcia, the Rolling Stones (which seems appropriate for these rocks), Frank Sinatra, George Gershwin, Led Zeppelin, Procol Harum, Bruce Springsteen and many others are all floating out there.

And fictional names also get their place in space. From Beowulf to Bilbo Baggins, Sherlock Holmes and Mr. Spock.

The number 5460 asteroid has the name Tsenaat'a'i which means “flying rock” in the Navaho language.

A name of pure invention, and some difficulty to pronounce at first glance, went to object 2037. It is named Tripaxeptalis. It is pronounced to sound like tri Pax sept Alice. The etymology of that is that its permanent designation is three times (tri) that of asteroid 679 Pax and seven times (sept) that of number 291 Alice.

 

Naming the Comets

Time-lapse of Comet 2I Borisov

An artist’s impression of `Oumuamua as a dark red highly-elongated metallic or rocky object,
about 400 meters long, and unlike anything normally found in the Solar System.

On December 8 this year, a newly discovered comet looped around our Sun after a journey of more than 100 million years from the birth of some very distant star. It makes its closest pass to Earth today and then heads out of our solar system again. By the middle of 2020, the comet will streak past Jupiter's distance of 500 million miles on its way back into interstellar space where it will drift for untold millions of years before skirting close to another star system.

It's only the second interstellar object to visit us, so it's a big deal. But it has the very boring name of "Comet 2I Borisov." It was discovered by Gennady Borisov, a Crimean astronomer, and, of course, he wanted his piece of history.

A much more interesting name goes to the first interstellar object to visit our solar system. That was ʻOumuamua.

The International Astronomical Union assigns designations for astronomical objects and they originally classified it as Comet C/2017 U1. Then it was reclassified as the equally boring asteroid A/2017 U1. The renaming was because it had no "coma" - the nebulous envelope around the nucleus of a comet formed when the comet passes close to the Sun and warms so that it gets a "fuzzy" appearance when viewed in telescopes and distinguishes it from stars. The word coma comes from the Greek "kome" (κόμη), which means "hair" and is the origin of the word comet itself.

Once this comet was identified as coming from outside the Solar System, a new designation was created: I, for Interstellar object. ʻOumuamua, as the first object so identified, was designated 1I but is also referred to as 1I; 1I/2017 U1; 1I/ʻOumuamua; or 1I/2017 U1 (ʻOumuamua). I'm only interested in ʻOumuamua.

What caught my attention first was that first character which is a Hawaiian ʻokina, and not an apostrophe. It is pronounced as a glottal stop.  The name comes directly from the Hawaiian word ʻoumuamua, meaning "scout," because the object has come from so far away to check us out. The name was chosen by the Pan-STARRS team in consultation with Kaʻiu Kimura and Larry Kimura of the University of Hawai‘i at Hilo. It was discovered by Robert Weryk using the Pan-STARRS telescope at Haleakala Observatory, Hawaii.

That is a much better name than 1I. But I would have been quite happy if they had gone with another suggested name: Rama. That is the name given to an alien spacecraft discovered under similar circumstances in the 1973 science fiction novel Rendezvous with Rama by Arthur C. Clarke. It's a novel I really enjoyed reading. That object was seen as an alien craft that was on a scouting expedition checking out the rest of the universe.

 ʻOumuamua is tumbling, rather than smoothly rotating, and is moving so fast relative to the Sun that there is no chance it originated in the Solar System and it cannot be captured into a solar orbit. It will leave our Solar System and resume traveling through interstellar after roughly 20,000 years of travel in the Solar System.

ʻOumuamua's planetary system of origin and the amount of time it has spent traveling amongst the stars are unknown. I love that mystery.

Ultima Thule

It is more difficult to get the public interested in celestial objects when they have names like "2014 MU69." Astronomers tend to name things initially and officially in that way but "sexier" names seem to come later more and more. (see this about that) This is a good thing. This site asks, "What's in a name?" A character from Shakespeare might say it doesn't matter, but I say it matters a lot.

The NASA team that works with the New Horizons exploratory spacecraft gave 2014 MU69 the nickname of Ultima Thule. Much better.

Thule was a mythical island that appeared on some old maps as being at the edge of the known world. It was also labeled as "Tile" on at least one map from 1539 called the Carta Marina. This was a map of what Nordic sailors knew about the world. They placed Thule near the Faroe Islands.

The Faroe Islands are not mythical. They (AKA Faeroe Islands) are a North Atlantic archipelago located 200 miles (320 km) north-northwest of the United Kingdom and about halfway between Norway and Iceland. Today they are an autonomous country of the Kingdom of Denmark with a total area of about 540 square miles and a population of over 50,000.

The direct translation of Ultima Thule is “beyond Thule” and is a very fitting name for something beyond the edges of our currently known world.

If you want to know a bit more about the space exploration side of Ultima Thule, check out this post on one of my other blogs. 

Thule (TILE) near the Faroe Islands - Carta Marina map, 1539.