Carrion Luggage

Terra Incognita

Let's do a thing for "Journalistic Intentions"  [18+] today.

Terra Cotta

It occurred to me once, long ago, that of all the words we've swiped from Latin, Terra is up there among the most common. Sure, "Earth" is a perfectly good Anglo-Saxonism; the Germanic-derived word has the advantage of being only one syllable, and we're lazy. Still, it's a thing, especially in science fiction, to use the two interchangeably. They can both be a name for our spinning home, but, as with Moon/Luna, the adjectival form of the Latin is far less awkward to deal with. "The Terran mating ritual is complex and fascinating" just sounds better than "The Earth peoples' mating ritual is complex and fascinating." And don't get me started on the infantile "Earthling," which, while not an adjective, conjures up images of menacing little green dudes with clear helmets and ray guns.

This, however, leaves "Earth" as the only planet whose English name (the IAU generally uses English as a lingua franca, which also amuses me because "lingua franca" isn't exactly Germanic) wasn't inspired by the Romans. We might consider doing that with the seventh planet from the sun, by the way, in an effort to finally put an end (heh heh he said end) the tired old puerile jokes about its name.

What strikes me as odd is that the Romans weren't even stellar astronomers. That's a pun, see; I wasn't saying they never looked at the stars or planets, just that when it came to skygazing, they weren't known for building big-ass stone calendars like whoever built Stonehenge, Göbekli Tepe, or Nim Li Punit. I suppose they did give us our Terran civil calendar, but as regular readers know, I have ambivalent feelings about that one: It isn't really related to anything but the Earth, Sun, and background stars—and even there, it's only loosely connected to equinoxes and solstices (don't get me started on how it leaves the Moon out entirely, except for acknowledging a subdivision called "months"). And, let's be real here, it took over a millennium for them, or at least Pope Gregory XIII, who was in Rome so he counts, to figure out how to do it with decent accuracy.

So we have Earth and Terra, and they're synonyms. Right? Wrong. There's one important difference: both words don't just refer to the planet. Earth is also a word (not capitalized unless it's at the beginning of a sentence like this one) for dirt or soil. I had a soil mechanics professor in engineering school who got pedantic about not calling soil "dirt," so of course we called it "dirt" behind his back. But this leads to amusing things like calling bulldozers and similar machines "earth movers," which confused the hell out of six-year-old Me: "You mean something can MOVE the EARTH?!"

Terra, on the other hand, when not referring to the world, describes the surface of it, not its three-dimensional depth. We still see this usage in Latinate words like "terrain" or "territory." This, too, leads to amusement, because I've seen references to "lunar terrain" or "Martian territory."

Now, full disclosure, I knew all of this stuff already, but I did use Google (ignoring AI slop) to verify that my memory was somewhat accurate. And it was. (I also had to check the spelling of Göbekli Tepe, which is in Türkiye and supposedly the most ancient known calendar site.) What I've never known, because it's impossible to know everything, is what in the living fuck "cotta" is.

So let's go back to Google, and ignore its atrocious AI.

Dictionary result: "a short garment resembling a surplice, worn typically by Catholic priests and servers."

Oh... it's related to the word "coat." Suddenly, everything clicks into place like terracotta tiles: "earth coat." This explains its use in architecture, but-

Hang on, what was that?

It's not from "cotta," but from "cocta," which translates to "cooked?"

Dammit. Okay, well, at least it's descriptive: baked earth.

Except.

Remember when I elucidated the difference between "terra" and "earth?" (I mean the uncapitalized versions.) Yeah, you're getting it: you're not baking the surface of the Earth to make your ceramic tiles or soldiers or whatever; you're firing up the kiln to harden the clay you dug up from it.

Language is weird.