Response to yesterday’s celestial Mt. Pinos post was so favorable I’m throwing caution to the wind and giving you a followup today that’s even more challenging. I may live to regret it. But I figure if you can swallow a hefty dose of Biblical Hebrew, you might also be able to stand a little something from the Annals of Ophthalmology. Am I right? Only time will tell…. Today’s Word of the Day is “scotoma.” This refers to the blind spot each of us have in the center of our visual field. It’s anatomically related to the place on our retinas at the back of each eyeball where optic nerve and blood vessels enter and leave the orbit. As such, there’s a small spot back there that’s devoid of sensory rods and cones. This makes us actually blind when looking at something directly in front of us. Usually it’s only detectable in an ophthalmologic exam. But sometimes it has more practical consequences – like last weekend as I watched shooting stars on Mt. Pinos.
Shooting stars are actually meteorites burning up in Earth’s atmosphere. When enough of them occur at one time, we call it a meteor shower. I’m not sure if what I observed on the mountaintop last weekend was a meteor shower or not. But on average I saw about one meteorite per minute. In my book, that constitutes a shower, regardless of what the experts say.
But here’s the thing: Once you see the first shooting star, your impulse is to stare at the spot where you saw the last one, anticipating the next. Given the fact of our central scotoma though, that’s exactly the wrong place to be looking. In fact, the best place to fix your gaze if you want to catch sight of a shooting star is near the horizon, where you’ll rarely see one directly. Then you catch a glimpse of one overhead, literally “out of the corner of your eye.” Funny how these things work, eh? Funny, but true.
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I don’t know what the ancients thought of shooting stars. My guess is, “meteorite” is not a term with direct antecedents in most languages. My further guess is, given our wildly recombinant human story-telling DNA, something more outlandish and/or colorful would be a better bet. Anyone with a background in anthropology or linguistics, feel free to jump in here, add to my limited understanding. Hey, I’m an empty vessel, waiting to be filled.
But one thing I do know is this: The central scotoma has a direct correlative in human psychology. What I mean by that is as follows: Often, solutions to many of life’s seemingly insoluble dilemmas can be found when we stop staring so hard at the problem. Better to look away for a bit, take a short break. Then, with a gaze that’s no longer so rigidly fixed, adding in tincture of time, we’ll often see an answer come to us literally “out of the blue.” Or “out of the corner of one’s eye?” You can probably think of your own examples. I know I can.
As to “why?” I say, don’t bother asking. It’s enough to know that something exists. We can adapt ourselves to it without knowing all the answers. Stare at any problem too long, too hard, or too straight on? You’ll likely miss out on much of life’s magic. Remember the shooting star. And the central scotoma. That’s my story and I’m sticking with it.
In the meantime…
Love it!
As the resident linguist, I can tell you that ‘meteor’ is from Greek, just like literally everything used in science terminology today. It used to refer to any glowing object in the sky, but even the modern ‘shooting star’ sense is from the 16th century. The Greek roots are ‘meta-‘ (by means of) and ‘aoros’ (raised, lifted, in the air). ‘Aoros’ shares a root with the English words ‘air’, ‘malaria’, ‘aura’ and ‘artery’, and if that doesn’t sound like a fun historical jaunt, I don’t know what does. I was trying to figure out if ‘meteor’ is related to ‘Metatron’, but my one true source, Etymonline, didn’t make that connection.
The ‘-ite’ is also from Greek, meaning ‘connected to’.
I skipped a few steps, but show me any term used in science and I’ll show you Greek. If you want fun, weird word origins, start looking at color names and days of the week.
Great post! Sorry to pick on the least important part of it!
More importantly, is “Tron” l(the movie) derived from Metatron?
Extra points for figuring out where “bolide” comes from.
I’m 90% sure ‘Tron’ is from ‘electron’ because it sounds ‘science-y’ and the etymology of Metatron is a weird puddle of Hebrew and/or Greek and/or angel’s names.
But maybe I’m not giving the creators of Tron enough credit, and there’s an analogy in there somewhere….
Bolide is also from Greek (surprise surprise) from ‘bolè’ (throw, missile)- the same root as parabola, hyperbole, ballista, and (weirdly) parable and symbol.
I had to expand my sources for this one, keep ’em coming!