Complex Numbers

What's In a Name?

This SciAm opinion piece from last summer supports the idea that words (including names) have power and should be chosen carefully.

    Astronomers Should Take a Deeper Look at Naming  
We should—and must—take careful measure of what we name cosmic objects and the terms we use throughout science

For full disclosure, I'm personally acquainted with the author.

To summarize the opening, the James Webb telescope (you know, the one out in space that's been taking pictures of the farthest reaches of the observable universe) was named after a controversial figure, and who wasn't even a scientist or astronaut.

For these and many other reasons, a large contingent of astronomers, including myself, prefer not to use the telescope’s official name and instead refer to it by its initials, JWST.

For similar reasons, I continue to call the airport across the river from DC "National Airport."

The observatory is the most visible example of this naming issue when it comes to science; the fight over statues of Confederate figures and buildings and roads named after such individuals is probably the most well known among the public.

While this article isn't even a year old, it seems to me that this particular controversy has faded already. We have short attention spans here.

For example, astronomers have a lot of nicknames we use for cosmic objects. That’s not surprising; “the Whirlpool galaxy” is a lot easier to remember than NGC 5194, its more official catalog name.

It's true that I can't remember official catalog names for most astronomical objects. To be fair, there are quite a few astronomical objects.

Not all names are so benign. NGC 2392 is a gaseous nebula, a favorite of amateur astronomers for its brightness and location on the sky, which make it easy to find. For decades, though, it was known as the Eskimo nebula, a term that is considered offensive by many Indigenous people in Canada and Greenland.

Because of this, at some point, they tried to rename it to the Clown Face Nebula, which, for whatever reason, some people still found offensive. To whom? Clowns?

It's also known as the Lion Nebula, but to the best of my knowledge, no African feline monarchs have come forward to claim offense.

Another example is a popular piece of astronomical software used to extract sources from an image. It was given the unfortunate name SExtractor. That should be pronounced “Ess Extractor,” but I don’t think it’s too much a stretch to see where the problem lies.

Okay, that's genuinely funny. And it's not even as perverted as the popular image of a business called Kids Exchange, the problem with which should be obvious when removing the space and capitalizing all the letters.

Unfortunately, this is one of those times when an article has been hanging around in my queue long enough for it to lose relevance, which it did last month. I mean, I agree with Phil here, don't get me wrong. It's just that, officially, we don't do "inclusivity" or "diversity" or "concern about someone taking offense" anymore.