Is science running out of names to call things?

Modern science faces a huge crisis says Russ Swan, one we have taken to calling the No Ability to Mine our Imagination and Name Greatly crisis, or ‘NAMING’ for short (…you see ‘science’, how hard can it be?)

Every silver lining has a cloud, a wise person once said. In the case of the current unprecedented pace of scientific discovery, the cloud in question is the ongoing crisis of nomenclature. We’re running out of names to call the things we’re finding, and the problem is getting critical.

A couple of months ago the UK Meteorological Office announced that it would soon start giving names to prominent weather features, in much the same way that hurricanes and typhoons have been named for decades. This, they said, would help raise awareness of the weather, in a way that peering out of the window apparently doesn’t. Having come up with this genius idea, the Met Office promptly had a crisis of creativity and reported that it couldn’t actually think of any names, and would the public please make suggestions?

Yes, they could – but few that would not be found in any list of baby names. There are some gems among the more creative proposals, though, including Teacup, Higgins, and the delightful Rainy McWindface. Personally, I’d quite like to see names drawn from comic book characters, especially the Marvel universe, because Storm Storm would be both memorable and a gift to headline writers.

Perhaps the best idea comes from @DeSmogBlog, who suggests that storms be named after prominent climate change deniers such as Lord Lawson and Lord Monckton. I would add a certain US presidential candidate to that mix, especially as ‘trump’ is a favourite childish euphemism for fart, or wind.

Coming back to ground level, the challenge of taxonomy has recently been tackled head-on by the British Mycological Society. It set out to establish an English language name to accompany the scientific name for each one of the many hundreds of fungi found on these islands. Even given the head start of many well-known ancient common names, the effort involved looks quite daunting and the society pleads in its published naming protocol that inspiration should be drawn from a wide range of sources.

The good news is that, where some societies seem determined to make themselves appear dusty and remote, this one retains a sense of fun and urges that “word play… provides one of the best means of reflecting British culture”. Thus we have Cinnamon Jellybaby, Mousepee Pinkgill, and Chicken Run Funnel joining the more sinister-sounding Fragrant Strangler and Destroying Angel, and the potentially dubious trio of Flasher, Sordid Blewit, and Green Gillgobbler.

If these are truly representative of British culture, what could be more quintessentially Australian than the scientific name adopted for a newly recognised species of reef fish? Plectorhinchus caeruleonothus was named in September by Queensland Museum scientist Jeff Johnson, who translated a colloquial name used by anglers. Caeruleo is Latin for blue, while nothus means bastard. For years, it seems, local legend spoke of the Blue Bastard – a large fish that was blue when adult, and a bastard to catch.

It is in the heavens, though, that we find the real crisis of nomenclature. In the recent gold rush of discovery, charting new details on Mercury and Mars, asteroids including Vesta and Ceres, comet 67P, the moons of the gas giants (and even our own one), and the collection of Kuiper Belt objects that make up the Pluto system, there is a vast backlog of features that need names but don’t yet have them.

The International Astronomical Union has a working group for planetary system nomenclature, known by the clumsy abbreviation WGPSN. You might think that first order of business for such a body might be to give itself a snappy and memorable moniker, but it looks like inspiration had deserted them already.

To be fair, the committee has a mountain (or a montes, in planetary geography lingo) of work to get through, and after all it is a committee – so nothing will happen easily or quickly. For evidence of this, simply check the online FAQs, where the question of paying for names for celestial objects appears more than once, and is given an answer running to 176 words with two outbound web links. The short answer is simply: No.

Some of the names give to features are unintentionally appropriate, or funny. Three bright arcs on a ring of Neptune are named for the French revolutionary motto Liberté Egalité Fraternité. Rings, revolution, you see? Meanwhile a crater on Pluto has been named H Smith, and I’m sure the committee hadn’t noticed the w-shaped feature right beside it.

Among the sources trawled in order to feed the vast need for names are the index pages of road atlases (small town in Uruguay? that’ll do), characters from works of fiction, and the pantheons of obscure deities. Oxo, for example, is not the god of gravy cubes but the ‘god of agriculture in Afro-Brazilian beliefs of Yoruba derivation’, and lends a name to a crater on Ceres.

The real evidence of a crisis in naming inspiration comes with the announcement a few weeks ago of the first official name for a topographical feature on that asteroid. The mountain is called Ysolo Mons, and is named after the first day of the aubergine harvest in Albania. The aubergine harvest. In Albania.

It’s hard to think of something more obscure, or more indicative of the present crisis in the science of naming.