Saturday 19 January 2013

Thinking About Uranus

From 1947 to 1969, the US Air Force investigated Unidentified Flying Objects under Project Blue Book. This project studied 12,618 sightings and managed to identify 11,917 of them but a further 701 defied explanation.
In 1979, the French reported that their own investigation into UFO's found a quarter of over 1,600 cases studied 'pose a real question' so with the real possibility that there is something out there, the biggest question we can possibly ask is, when did we change the pronunciation of Uranus?
When i was in school, the seventh planet from the Sun was pronounced 'your-anus' but now it seems to have morphed into 'you-ranus' which isn't any where near as humorous, how can a schoolkid tell a teacher that he heard there was rings around 'you-ranus', that doesn't work at all.
I'm sure William Herschel knew what he was doing when the Astronomy society rejected the names he wanted for the planet, 'George's Star' or 'Georgian Planet' in honour of King George III, so vindictively plumped for Uranus after the Greek god of the sky, Ouranos, and forever being the butt of jokes for the rest of eternity, or until some killjoys decided to change how the name is pronounced.
The Royal bootlicker would be spinning in his grave if he knew what some people were getting up to when it came to Uranus despite the Oxford English Dictionary stating that it is pronounced 'yer-eh-nus' as in 'i think we need to explore Uranus' which will get any kid a detention at least if he said it to their teacher in Geography or Maths but is perfectly okay in Science.
School children today are missing out on all this, i had my pronunciation of the planet corrected by a teenager the other day which shows that the fiendish plan to rename Uranus as 'you-ranus' is well advanced and the youngest generation will never know the joys of comments such as 'I'm researching Uranus' or 'there's a dark spot on Uranus' or even 'hey, did you know they found a new ring around Uranus' or even my personal favourite 'Dad, is Uranus bigger than Mars?'
So what if our interstellar visitors do come from the big blue gas ball, and we greet them as our visitors from 'you-ranus' and they have to embarrass us but saying actually they are from 'your-anus', red faces all around.
I think we all need to carefully think about Uranus and watch it closely because for all we know Uranus could be crawling with life despite the noxious gases emanating from Uranus that could kill a man.

2 comments:

Cheezy said...

It's a good killjoy test, to see whether a person pronounces it 'your anus' or 'you-ranus'. The latter = humourless killjoy!

haveaniceday said...

I expect it was a PC thing, sounds a bit rude your way.