There are many things that we all agree are troublesome about being old. But if am going to complain about aging, I prefer to be unique in my regrets. So I shall now go on record as saying I hadn’t realized until recently that I no longer have a prayer of counting from one to a billion.
That ambitious endeavor would take over 31 years, so I would need to live to be 109 to complete the chore. Even though I remain an incurable optimist, I am guessing my obituary will not read “1948-2057” under my name. I console myself in the knowledge that counting from one to a million is a quickie task of only eleven days.
All these thoughts about millions and billions came about because I have been pondering The Milky Way (the galaxy, not the candy bar). With its infinite stars, “millions” and “billions” are the only number systems that come close to inventorying such interplanetary plenty.
And leave it to the Ancient Greeks to have given us such a gift with their naming of our galaxy. When they gazed up into the heavens some 2500 years ago, they immediately remembered that Hera, their Queen of the Gods, spilled milk across the sky, which is still the “milky way” our star system appears to us, even in this non-mythological age.
And if you are a word hound, as I am, you rejoice in the knowledge that the ancient Greek word for “milky” was “galaxias”; therefore accident-prone Hera not only inspired the name of our star system, but the name of all the other galaxies, too.
Since this essay is milking etymology for all it’s worth, let’s take a quick look at that other, sweeter Milky Way. Its creator, Frank Mars, wanted to invent a candy bar that tasted exactly like the new malted milkshake that was wildly popular back in 1923, so he emphasized in its name the unique milkshake taste of his chocolate bar.
While James Bond preferred his martinis shaken (not stirred), Frank Mars preferred his milk shaken (not spilled)!
I have found it very comforting that as vast as our Milky Way is, we’ve always had an adjoining nebula: the Andromeda Galaxy, known as our “neighbor” in the universe, which is only visible to the naked eye on moonless nights. How nice that we have something next door to us in the lovely heavens.
Since I have already confessed to my love of hunting word derivations as eagerly as hounds hunt prey, you probably think I am now going to treat you to a fascinating look at why we call our next door galaxy “Andromeda.” Wrong. Andromeda was just a passive, nothing-special mythological princess, rescued by Perseus after cruel Neptune had chained her to a rock to be devoured by a sea monster. Perseus then married her and made her his queen. Her name means “to be protected by her man”— hardly a heroine and certainly no Hera.
No, the word I am interested in is what the Andromeda galaxy is to us: a “neighbor.” Did you know that the word comes from two Middle English words: “nayuh” for “near” and “boor” for “peasant”? (I hope not. There’s nothing worse than a student who is already smarter than I am). Poor peasants—they still get no respect. Today, their original name, “boor”, is our modern word for “lout” or “yahoo.”
In the Middle Ages, with serfs galore, your neighbor was usually a peasant living in your proximity. Amazingly, this was true for kings as well as commoners. Since a king’s castle was surrounded by hundreds of acres that he owned, mostly forest land, his closest neighbor, too, would have been a rural peasant.
And so let us return to our infinite universe, defined by billions and billions of stars. We should be grateful to those early astronomers who discovered that we are not alone, but possess a neighboring star cluster very similar to our Milky Way. And let’s not forget to thank Hera. Keep her myth alive by raising your eyes to the night skies —where, contrary to the famous saying, there is much use in “spying” over spilt milk!
Email Elliot at huffam@me.com or click here