Thursday, October 15, 2009

The Name of the Moon

I have decided that I am going to name the Moon.
I don’t know if it has ever dawned on anyone that our moon has no real name. It may have had names in other cultures, in other languages, at other times, but in English it doesn’t really seem to have one. Or if it does, it certainly isn’t used.
I mean can you imagine a car company that put out an object simply called "the Car." I mean if I had three hands I’d say that it was audacious on the one hand, unimaginative on the other one, and just plain dumb on the third. Other planets have great names like Euorpa, Ganymede, and Callisto of Jupiter. We just call ours “the Moon.” How dull is that?
I mentioned this to my coworkers the other day in a moment of epiphany—when I realized that I could be the first person to name the Moon. So I joked that I would, of course, name it after myself. I could call it "Ken. " But my coworkers pointed out that Ogle would be a much better name for the moon. The more I thought about it, the more I decided they were right. I mean the moon is O shaped in the the first place, and Ogle starts with a long O sound making the mouth go round like the moon is round, and the name kind of connotes watching and all--as if the moon were a kind of eyeball looking down on us all.
I’ve read some articles in the Ogle/ogles family journal—a publication that keeps track of Ogles about the origin of the name which some think was once Ogill and that was a derivative of Ogg Hill where they speculated the first of our clan lived. Around 1066 there is apparently a record of a license given to a certain Humphry de Ogle to run a mannor in Northumbria. I figure the ‘de’ was a kowtow to the Normans and that Humphry figured it was better to join them that get beat by them. It is an old and honorable name associated with English aristocracy and nobility until the mighty have fallen in my day.
So it wouldn’t be a bad name for the Moon. On the other hand--o gosh, I just realized--we often use the word “Mooned.” If we changed the moon's name to Ogle, what would that do to the good name of our family? Suddenly people wouldn’t be mooned they’d be--- Nope. I’ve just decided to call the moon Ken. I’d much rather be “Kenned.”

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