Starship Asterisk*

beyond wrote:

neufer wrote: never use a short word when a long one will do, especially if you are not certain what it means

The Milliways Pundit says -- He that thinks by the inch and speaks by the yard, should be kicked by the foot!

neufer wrote: never use a short word when a long one will do, especially if you are not certain what it means

neufer wrote:Never use a short word when a long one will do, especially if you are not certain what it means.

bystander wrote:
aw·ful - literally, full of awe

1. extremely bad; unpleasant; ugly
2. inspiring fear; dreadful; terrible

• 1. Waste meat; the parts of an animal butchered which are unfit for use or rejected.
  2. Carrion; coarse meat.
  3. Refuse; that which is thrown away as of no value, or fit only for beasts.
  4. Any thing of no value; rubbish.
  ----------------------------------------------------------------
  ___ Julius Caesar > Act I, scene III
  
  CASSIUS: what trash is Rome,
  ___ What rubbish and what OFFAL,
  ..................................................................
  ___ Merry Wives of Windsor > Act III, scene V
  
  FALSTAFF: Have I lived to be carried in a basket, like a
  ___ barrow of butcher's OFFAL, and to be thrown in the
  ___ Thames? Well, if I be served such another trick,
  ___ I'll have my brains ta'en out and buttered, and give
  ___ them to a dog for a new-year's gift.

owlice wrote:
Oh bother! Use "wonder" instead of "awe," then, if it pleases you.

I were gruntled; now, somewhat dis.

neufer wrote:AWE is taken from the Old English "AGHE" , meaning 'DREAD'.
Never use a short word when a long one will do, especially if you are not certain what it means.
-------------------------------------------------------------------------------
AWE, n. [OE. ae, aghe, fr. Icel. agi; akin to AS. ege, ga, Goth. agis, Dan. ave chastisement, fear,
Gr. pain, distress, from the same root as E. ail. 3. Cf. Ugly.] Dread; great fear mingled with respect.

Di wrote:I wonder why isn't there a single star in that beautiful sky! It might have been too early in the evening for the stars to become visible, but if that was the case, then Amir darkened the sky (thanks, Photoshop!) to help the Moon and Venus -also the silhouettes- stand out from the background... Sorry if I appear so distrustful, but as a photographer in the digital age I've learnt to doublecheck on images that look "too clean to be true"! If it was a straight shot, congratulations, Amir!

owlice wrote:
I like this image a lot; it's very peaceful and captures the sense of sharing the AWE of the heavens with good friends.

• • Measure For Measure > Act II, scene IV
  ANGELO: How often dost thou with thy case, thy habit,
  ___ Wrench AWE from fools and tie the wiser souls
  ___ To thy false seeming!
  
  • King Henry IV, part II > Act IV, scene V
  PRINCE HENRY: Let God for ever keep it from my head
  ___ And make me as the poorest vassal is
  ___ That doth with AWE and terror kneel to it!
  
  • Hamlet > Act V, scene I
  HAMLET: O, that that earth, which kept the world in AWE,
  ___ Should patch a wall to expel the winter flaw!
  
  • King Henry V > Act IV, scene I
  KING HENRY V: ART thou aught else but place, degree and form,
  ___ Creating AWE and fear in other men?
  ___ Wherein thou ART less happy being fear'd
  ___ Than they in fearing.

Chris Peterson wrote:

owlice wrote:Chris, I'm not bent out of shape, nor am I a linguistic conservative. I am, however, a musician and familiar with the origin of the (Italian) word and the meaning it carries for musicians. I'm agreeing with you that it's OKAY to use the term as it was used here. It's not the most precise usage, but it doesn't need to be.

Sorry if I wasn't clear... I wasn't calling you a linguistic conservative, nor did I sense you were bent out of shape. My comment was directed at a few other disgruntled posters who had nothing to say about the image, but merely complained about a word in the caption.

owlice wrote:Chris, I'm not bent out of shape, nor am I a linguistic conservative. I am, however, a musician and familiar with the origin of the (Italian) word and the meaning it carries for musicians. I'm agreeing with you that it's OKAY to use the term as it was used here. It's not the most precise usage, but it doesn't need to be.

Chris Peterson wrote:

owlice wrote:Indeed, a crescendo is an increase; it's also used informally to indicate the result of the "building up," whether talking about music or something else. Put another way, I've heard the term used by conductors and other musicians in the same sense it's used in today's APOD. Not the most precise usage, but not a sin.

Most English dictionaries, including the OED, give one definition of "crescendo" as "climax", in both musical and non-musical contexts. So the usage is neither informal nor imprecise, but is perfectly proper English. (The OED dates the musical usage meaning climax, with the example "reached its crescendo", to 1903.)

I'm always amused when linguistic conservatives get so bent out of shape by the continual changing of English. It is precisely that flexibility that makes it the richest, most literary language on Earth. And to worry about this one word- in a context everybody understands- when there's a beautiful image to discuss... well, that's just crazy!

neufer wrote:Madwakemiherculossed !!!

http://www.guardian.co.uk/science/2010/dec/13/starwatch-geminids-meteors wrote:
Starwatch: The Geminids – rich and mysterious
Alan Pickup, guardian.co.uk
Monday 13 December 2010 08.00 GMT

Starwatch Dec 13 Graphic: Jenny Ridley

---

<<Tonight sees the peak of perhaps the most puzzling, meteor shower of the year. The Geminids shower, which began almost a week ago and continues until Thursday, should be most spectacular before dawn tomorrow when up to 120 meteors per hour might be counted under ideal skies.

Geminids are slow (35 km per second) and often bright as they trace parallel paths into the Earth's upper atmosphere. Perspective means that they appear to diverge from a radiant in Gemini, hence the shower's name. That point, close to the star Castor and plotted on our chart of the constellation, climbs from near the NE horizon at nightfall to pass some 70° high in the S at 02:00 before sinking through the W before dawn. Meteors, though, rain down in all parts of the sky – it is just their paths that point back to the radiant.

Three factors make the morning hours more favourable for Geminids spotting. The first is moonlight which swamps the fainter meteors. The Moon lies close to the bright planet Jupiter this evening and does not set until after midnight. The second factor is the radiant's altitude; when the radiant is highest in the sky we see more meteors because we are facing more "head-on" into the stream of Geminid meteoroids as they orbit the Sun. And thirdly, the Earth is expected to plough through the densest part of the stream tomorrow morning.

Meteoroids in that stream take about 524 days to plunge from the asteroid belt, beyond the orbit of Mars, to inside the orbit of Mercury, and back again. They follow the same eccentric orbit as the asteroid Phaethon, 5km wide and at the root of the mystery. Most meteor showers occur when the Earth encounters the dust left along the orbits of comets. Phaethon, though, is not a comet and nor does it appear to be an extinct comet nucleus; indeed its spectrum links it to the large asteroid Pallas, 544km wide. Were Phaethon and other so-called Palladian asteroids blasted from Pallas in some ancient collision? And where does the dust in Phaethon's orbit, our Geminid meteoroids, come from? One theory, backed up last year by observations of Phaethon as it passed through perihelion only 21 million km from the Sun, is that the Sun's intense heat can cause Phaethon's rocks to shatter, with the fragments able to escape Phaethon's feeble gravitational pull to replenish the Geminids stream.

Incidentally, the star cluster M35, near the right edge of our chart, lies only 4° E (left) of the Moon's position during the total lunar eclipse before dawn on the 21st. The Moon begins to enter the central dark umbra of the Earth's shadow at 06:33 and is fully within the umbra by 07:41 as it dips towards our NW horizon.>>

Chris Peterson wrote:

owlice wrote:
Indeed, a crescendo is an increase; it's also used informally to indicate the result of the "building up," whether talking about music or something else

Most English dictionaries, including the OED, give one definition of "crescendo" as "climax", in both musical and non-musical contexts. So the usage is neither informal nor imprecise, but is perfectly proper English. (The OED dates the musical usage meaning climax, with the example "reached its crescendo", to 1903.)

owlice wrote:Indeed, a crescendo is an increase; it's also used informally to indicate the result of the "building up," whether talking about music or something else. Put another way, I've heard the term used by conductors and other musicians in the same sense it's used in today's APOD. Not the most precise usage, but not a sin.

neufer wrote:Yes, but folks with slow internet connections probably don't need to see silhouettes in high def.