Lagoon-Trifid gateway and the nebula of names

Two beautiful nebulae, bright clouds about 5,000 light-years distant and 50 light-years wide, appear to form a gateway, about one degree wide, across the road of the Sun, the ecliptic.

The half-degree-wide Sun comes shouldering through this gate almost exactly at the December solstice. The Moon and planets, at their every circuit of the sky, pass between or close to these gatepost nebulae.

This detail from the Map of the Starry Sky shows the region where the southernmost part of the ecliptic crosses the central, widest, and richest part of the Milky Way. You could call it the Supernode or Grand Node of our sky. Shown in white are the 18h right ascension line and the -30° declination line (like longitude and latitude on Earth). The broad blue line is the ecliptic. The dotted line is the galactic equator or plane of the Milky Way. The pink line is the boundary between constellations Sagittarius (left) and Ophiuchus. Areas in the Milky Way are darker where more dust absorbs light of the millions of stars. A few stars are near enough to be individually visible to the unaided eye,  such as Mu Sagittarii. The objects with Messier numbers are nebulae, open star clusters (dotted circles), and globular clusters (dot-filled).

 

Nebula of names’ associations

When I first had use of a telescope, at a school in high dry northern Arizona, I talked incessantly about the stars. “Come out and see the Trifid Nebula and the Lagoon Nebula,” I urged people, and Barbara laughed at me: “You just like the names!”

I’m not alone in the habit of liking and collecting and inventing names, though I may be toward an obsessive extreme. Names are a subset of words; and, among names, star names are a glistering subset. Don’t we all relish Vega and Capella and Altair and Caph and Saiph and Deneb Delphini and the Pole Star’s wealth of by-names, Lodestar, Stella Maris, Tramontana, and dislike Dschubba and Zubenelgenubi, and, as we look up at giant Betelgeuse, pronounce him with awe and sly amusement?

Value judgments about names, and about language in general, are subjective: personal. Yet each such judgment may have a causal explanation: the associations that it evokes. It rings a bell, or bells, conscious or subconscious, which ring other bells, farther and fainter; a ramifying network of associations. Some of the bells are other bits of language; others are memories of experiences. A Tim can’t help seeming timid, until you meet or know more about him. Terry can’t help chiming with terror, though all the Terries I have known were benignly helpful people. Syria suggests syrup even though it runs with blood. We catch ourselves thinking the formidable Hittites got their name from the forceful English word.

If I wonder why I like the name Elgar (and the Greek word gar, “for,” and Persian agar, “if”), whereas Gary is a mis-spelling of my name that makes me wince, I think it is because one rings bells with garden and the other with garage, garret, garrison. My adolescent interests in ancient history and in tennis got me drunk on names like Amonhotep and Aeschylus and the combination of euphony and appropriateness in the names of Mottram and Paish (they were England’s top players) and Drobny and the Slazenger tennis racket.  And it seemed unjust that Flory Van Donck lost the golf championship to Peter Thompson.

Altair: obvious associations with altar, altitude, exalt. Vega: association with vegetation and the Spanish word for a fertile river meadow. But the star’s name has two pronunciations: British similar to eager; American similar to vaguer, which brings in vague, the French word for a wave. Menkalinan may gain a bit by rhythmic assonance with Excalibur, but lose a smaller bit because of Caliban. We could imagine associations as factors contributing to the brightness of names like the factors that contribute to the magnitude – astronomical brightness –  of the stars themselves. For me, the highest in association-magnitude would be Arcturus.

In several Spanish cities, notably Barcelona, there is an avenue called the Rambla, from Arabic ramlah, “sandy,” since it was once the bed of a stream. The pedestrian avenue’s leisurely character is enhanced for English-speakers by association with the unrelated word ramble.

 

Blame Sancho Panza

Yes, him, the sub-hero of the universal book, Don Quixote de la Mancha. Sancho’s the guy who got me re-started on this hobby-horse of a topic. Because of him, earthy common-sense peasant with no pretension to chivalry or courage, the name Sancho provokes an indulgent smile. We can almost hear the gaunt idealistic knight, up on his gaunt horse, speaking down to his chubby skeptical squire or manservant on the donkey: “Really, Sancho…”

Only after I had re-read the Quixote for maybe the dozenth time did I become aware that the name Sancho had been borne by a dozen Spanish kings. Retrospectively and ridiculously and momentarily they all become clownish, even Sancho IV “the Brave” of Castile and Sancho VII “the Strong” of Navarre. How could their mothers do it to them?

Sancho rings a further bell with Pancho. Which connects to the topic of informal names, some of which are called pet names, diminutives or abbreviations. Pancho is said to be the informal version of Francisco. Well, that was true in the most notorious example, the Mexican revolutionary Pancho Villa; also the tennis star Francisco “Pancho” Segura, but not for Ricardo “Pancho” González. It may have spread to become a general nickname for Hispanics. That was how it was used in a school of my childhood to tease a boy who, though English, boasted of his family’s vast ranch in Tierra del Fuego.

It may be that -cho is a suffix for nicknames, perhaps deriving from gaucho, the cowboy of the South American pampas. El Mencho, the murderous drug cartel boss recently killed in Mexico: his name was Nemesio Oseguera Cervantes, and I hope he was no relation to Miguel de Cervantes Saavedra. We can imagine the nickname being at first Nemcho, then slipping into more easily pronounced Mencho. Nemesio, which relates to Nemesis, the most dire of the three Fates, the one who cuts the thread of life, seems a perverse name to give to a child, though in this case it proved to fit all too well.

I realized that I had never checked the etymology of Sancho; it, too, must be an adaptation of something, but what? If Pancho conceals Francisco, and Mencho conceals Nemesio, Sancho must conceal something, but what, Sansón or Samuel or Alejandro.

Sanctius. “Saintly.”

Of course. Might have guessed.

If it were not for the later and overwhelming association with the funny fat peasant on donkey-back, the name Sancho would ring like Victor or Benedict or Theodore or Godwin.

Cervantes delighted in playing with names. “They say that his name was Quixada or Quesada, there is debate about it, though it seems clear that he was called Quexana. This is of little importance for our story, what maters is that in telling it we stray not a hair’s breadth from the truth.” That may ring a sly bell with the quesadilla. And he pretends that the author of the story was a Moor named Cide Hamete Benengeli, which Sancho mangles to Berenjena, “aubergine.”

Sancho, a joker, was himself, by reason of the name chosen for him, an irreverent joke.

Exquisitely skillful wood carving of Don Quixote, given to me by a Spanish friend. Alas, the knight’s sword has been lost, and he is so lean that his feet have broken off.

I think the Sancho case is a strong piece of evidence that value judgments about language have ascertainable causes. So the subject is not outside the bounds of legitimate science. Studies could be made of, for instance, what causes many English-speakers to say that German is an ugly, “guttural” language, whereas to me it sounds beautiful.

 

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