BAN #413: Renaming things: Small effort, big outcome

28 March 2022 Issue #413

March 28, 2022

Blog Jam

[A big 1.609 kilometerstone was reached this week: The 5000th exoplanet was found. From Tuesday’s article. Credit: NASA/JPL-Caltech]

Tuesday 22 March, 2022: 5,000th exoplanet found!

Social justice

If we don’t do our part, who will?

[Content warning: Contains some words folks might find offensive, but the point of this article is to talk about these offensive words and find alternatives. In some cases words like this are so well known they need not be written out, but in this case they are not as well known, and I think the positive aspect of talking about them outweighs the negative. I’ll note the New York Times has a similar policy.]

A little while back my friend Drew Curtis (the founder of Fark.com) sent me a note with a question that hit me by surprise: Did I know of any astronomical objects with names that could be considered offensive? Maybe to various different groups of people?

He linked to this article on a news site saying that NASA was reconsidering the names of some astronomical objects because they are insensitive. The two listed specifically in the article are NGC 2392, the Eskimo Nebula, and NGC 4567 and 4568, the Siamese Twin Galaxies. NASA has an official page on this topic as well.

Fair enough. I’ll note that I didn’t know until pretty recently that the word “Eskimo” was considered offensive, to be honest, which is why I’m using the word specifically here, because I don’t think this is widely known and it’s good to get the word out. Wikipedia has a decent synopsis on this. The listing for NGC 2392 on Wikipedia discusses the name, and also says that it was called the Clown Faced Nebula by some people, and that’s been discouraged as well, probably due to it being associated with Inuits initially.

[NGC 2392, which, if you squint a little, looks like a vaguely smiling human face in a furry parka hood. Credit: Peter and Suzie Erickson/Adam Block/NOAO/AURA/NSF]

I think the nickname for NGC 4567/8 is also pretty obviously not a great one, and NASA has made it a policy not to refer to them using it anymore; again Wikipedia has this covered.

I’m all for this; it’s a minor inconvenience to rename something, and if it makes astronomy more inclusive then I’m happy (I’ll note that recently, the Entomological Society of America officially changed the common name for the Lymantria dispar moth from “gyspy moth” to “spongy moth” for similar reasons).

I wrote a blog post a while back about the use of the term “manned exploration” — A Lesson in Crewed Language — where I wrote:

I know a few folks will froth and fume over this change; some people get very hot and bothered when others want to be more inclusive. But things like this cost us very little, and the payoff is large. Even if the cost were higher it wouldn’t matter, because it’s the right thing to do.

Everyone deserves to feel welcome when it comes to math, science, and tech … really everywhere. There’s no way to know from someone’s sex, skin color, or superficial characteristics what they might contribute. We all have brains. What we all need is a chance—and the environment—to participate.

But back to Drew’s question, I thought about it for a while and came up empty. I was surprised, actually, as so many of the “nicknames” in our language is based on putting other people or groups of people down. Yet I couldn’t come up with anything. I mean, maybe the constellation Virgo, but that seems a stretch. The maniacal stress some religions and groups of people put on virginity is weird at best and dangerous at worst, and certainly massively misogynistic with horrid implications, but I’m not sure the name for the constellation really plays into it much. And changing that at this point would be an effort far more colossal than it may be worth. If I’m missing something here please leave a comment! I’m always open to listening to reasoned arguments in situations like this.

[The colliding galaxies NGC 4567 (upper left) and 4568 (lower right), located in the Virgo cluster about 60 million light-years from Earth. Credit: ESO]

The only other thing I could think of was a piece of astronomical software. It was designed to automatically find all the objects in a digital telescopic image, fitting them to various circles or elliptical shapes to help astronomers identify the sources in the image and extract their characteristics (size, brightness, etc.)

It was given the unfortunate name of SExtractor, short for “Source Extractor”. A lot of folks have a problem with that, not surprisingly, especially after a successor was given an even worse name. Some versions of it have been renamed, which is progress, I suppose, and the newest versions of the documentation refer to it by its full name now.

But that’s about it, surprisingly. I’m glad there’s some effort to rename things, and if there are astronomical objects or related topics I’m missing, please let me know.

It’s a small step, especially compared to the huge issues in things like sports team names, which range form uncomfortable to appalling (I used to live near Washington DC, and it wasn’t until I was older that I realized just how grotesque the football team’s name was).

As with the use of “crewed”, of course some people will whine that this is an attack on being white, or male, or whatever. That’s nonsense. The author of this aphorism isn’t known, but the statement itself is still true and powerful: “When you’re accustomed to privilege, equality feels like oppression.”

Renaming things isn’t an attack on anyone. This isn’t a zero-sum game. There’s room for everyone, and all we have to do is the most minimal effort to make it obvious and easier for a lot of folks.

It’s the right thing to do.

Et alia

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