> Melanoheliophobia
Tangential, but this being a nearly word-for-word translation of “black hole fear” made me realize how odd it is that we insist on latinizing these things.
> Melanoheliophobia
Tangential, but this being a nearly word-for-word translation of “black hole fear” made me realize how odd it is that we insist on latinizing these things.
Helio- is actually "sun", not "hole", and it's Greek, not Latin, but I 100% agree with you: it's pointless technical vocabulary that only serves to obfuscate. I think in this particular case, it's just some internet neologism (which is a good word, since coinage can mean a couple different things), made based on analogies with older phobias. For those of us who know Latin and Greek, though, all we can really do is shrug at the eagerness to make the clumsiest words possible.
My headcanon is that the neologism was coined by Vicky Karayiannis, widow of Chris Cornell.
https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Chris_Cornell#Personal_life
The modern Greek terms for "black hole" are:
μαύρη τρύπα or μελανή οπή
https://el.wikipedia.org/wiki/%CE%9C%CE%B1%CF%8D%CF%81%CE%B7...
helio- cannot mean "star" in a generic way but invariably refers to our own Sun. If referring to some other star, then we use aster-.
The translation of the name appears to be intended as “black star fear”.
With the "black star" being the name for "black hole" back when they were purely theoretical idea.
What would be the correct latin/greek word for it?
Melanotrypophobia, although the Greek term is "mayri trypa", literally "black hole".
Any relation to the words melancholy?
Yes, as the sibling said, melancholy means "black bile".
Yes, that is cognate with ancient Greek μελαγχολία, and with the same root: μέλας
https://en.wiktionary.org/wiki/melancholy
Hypochondriac
I've also wondered the same thing about healthcare and other fields. All the complex sounding phrases are child-like in simplicity in their "native" tongue, yet completely indecipherable to most people in modern times. Quite a weird and undesirable path we ended up going down through inertia.
It's useful to search for the same thing and get results in different languages
I’ve long considered medical jargon to be Latin Buffyspeak[1] because it’s usually just describing the body part, often simplistically, but in Latin so it sounds fancy.
[1] https://tvtropes.org/pmwiki/pmwiki.php/Main/BuffySpeak
It’s arguable whether it’s weird or undesirable. There are benefits to using unusual words when they have precise scientific or other technical meaning. It helps identify them as terms of art, so that they’re not confused with their native tongue equivalent, which invariably has much looser meanings.
Sure, but I think there's some cause/effect to consider there. The same logic would have applied in Ancient Rome, but I expect that people would have likely been less casual with their usage of such terms when they also had specific technical meanings.
For example many food dishes we have retain basic naming conventions, yet have well understood meaning. In the US a customer ordering spaghetti is likely to be quite unhappy if they get a cream sauce, even though the order itself is literally just the name of the noodle.
"Spaghetti" is a great example - notice how you have specific expectations of food that happens to be named in a foreign (relative to where you live) language.
> I expect that people would have likely been less casual with their usage of such terms when they also had specific technical meanings.
Why would you expect that? It seems the opposite of what we see in practice. Colloquial language typically makes no concessions to technical usage.
Your example works against your own position. “Spaghetti” is an Italian word, much like the Greek portmanteau that started this discussion. The idea that it implies a particular sauce is purely regional, as you noted by saying “In the US”. (I had to ask an LLM what you might mean - apparently you would expect tomato sauce.) Ironically, that would not be expected in Italy.
So here we have a word taken from another language, which has a local connotation which depends on a shared context. As with all language, one has to learn that context. It doesn’t matter that much what the words are. If the word had been “thinnoodle” instead, that’s what you would have learned and been familiar with. (“Noodle” comes from German and entered English about 65 years before spaghetti, apparently.)
I suppose the difference I see, and the motivation for change, is an issue of familiarity. Everybody knows what spaghetti is and so calling it thin noodle doesn't add much clarity for most people. By contrast many, probably the overwhelming majority, of terms that are in Latin are unfamiliar. And continuing to pile on in that domain just adds to the things people will generally be unfamiliar with.
And these are in domains that people will certainly come into contact with in their life, like healthcare, so it's not like just nitpicking over e.g. pure math's preference for having people's names attached to various mathematical constructs as opposed to something even vaguely descriptive. Very few people will ever interact with pure math in 'normal' life, so it's largely inconsequential.
I mean just imagine we were going to do things over, and in starting to name medical conditions somebody said, 'Hey I have an idea - instead of naming everything in an obvious way let's name everything using some obscure language almost nobody understands.' Nobody would really be on board with that, but we ultimately ended up in that exact scenario.