Celestia Forums

At last an end to "Xena" and "Gabrielle"
These bodies are now officially Eris and Dysnomia, according to IAUC 8747.

Get the updated version of outersys.ssc from the CVS tree:
http://celestia.cvs.sourceforge.net/celestia/celestia/data/outersys.ssc

Grant

The goddess of discord.
Very appropriate given the chaos that has reigned since its discovery.

Grant

Good news!!

Eris?! Oh man, the Discordians are gonna love that!!

Hail Eris!!!

See, it was all a plot to have more planets named after women. Venus, Ceres, and now Eris, well and Earth, not masculine as Gaia or Hera. That would have been 4 out of 12...

Okay, just kidding, don't take me seriously.

Fnord.

After all the controversy surrounding this planet I think Eris is very appropriate.
What does Dysnomia mean?
Lawlessness.

Hmm; I will be interested to see what name they come up with for the even more controversial 2003 EL61

eburacum45 wrote:What does Dysnomia mean?

In medicine, it's the condition of not being able to recall names.
Seems more appropriate for some of the outer Saturnian satellites, if you ask me ...

Grant

I am familiar with the conditions dyspraxia and dyslexia; I expected dysnomia to mean namelessness rather than lawlessness. This moon had been nameless for some time, after all.

eburacum45 wrote:Fnord.

After all the controversy surrounding this planet I think Eris is very appropriate.
What does Dysnomia mean?
Lawlessness.

Hmm; I will be interested to see what name they come up with for the even more controversial 2003 EL61

Ah well, a good bout of lawlessness to cure the lucylawlesslessness...

hmm...

(sorry, a pun that atrocious, I couldn't resist...)

eburacum45 wrote:I am familiar with the conditions dyspraxia and dyslexia; I expected dysnomia to mean namelessness rather than lawlessness. This moon had been nameless for some time, after all.

You can see the relationship to laws in the English words eunomy ("a political condition of good laws, well administered"), anomy ("disregard for law") and the French anomie, which is more of a personal lack of values.
It's only happenstance, I think, that dysnomia has been purloined by the medical community: names are stored in a different bit of your brain from other words, so it's possible for a stroke to damage the "naming" part but not the other areas of speech. A word was needed for that condition.

But another possible meaning for dysnomia would be "a difficult naming", which certainly applies here ...

Grant

And nomos pops up in the word astronomy as well, apparently.
astronomia = astron + nomos, literally, "law of the stars"
(from wiki)

More standard sources, like the Oxford English Dictionary, tend to give the translation of astronomos as "star-arranging" or "star-classification". Which fills in the logical connection between the meanings "name" and "law".

Grant