Bugs by any other name

SAN DIEGO – I’m one of a very few people I know who would get upset over a revelation that came to me yesterday. I don’t expect most people to care but I’m writing about it anyway. If you’re not at all interested in esoteric rants, see you tomorrow. Did you know (and I bet you didn’t) that what you used to call ‘insects’ are now more properly called ‘hexapods?’ I didn’t know that, but I do now. Hexapods. Shit you not.

All of the six-legged arthropods I was taught are insects are now lumped into the taxonomic subphylum Hexapoda. Hexapods are further divided into four sub-phyla, Insecta and three other groups with silly Greek names. I think one of them is called Pterodactyl or something. As upset as I was to learn that I was laboring under an old mental dogma, I was more troubled still by the fact that six-legged creatures hadn’t ought to be called “hexa” (six) “pod” (foot) in the first place on account of properly speaking they don’t gots foots. So imagine my dismay upon checking the lexicon to discover that in Greek, rather a precise language, ordinarily speaking, there is no distinction between ‘foot’ and ‘leg,’ both of which translate as πόδι.

With my worldview thus shattered vis-à-vis both entomology and etymology, I sank into a deep, blue funk and wondered how I’ve become an anachronism in my own time.

There’s more. Used to be there were four kinds of primates: us, apes (greater and lesser), monkeys (old world and new) and prosimians. Prosimians were so called because they weren’t truly simian yet, but were early primate forerunners of more recently evolved species. Prosimians included tarsiers, lemurs, lorises and a handful of other critters including the aye-aye (who has the coolest common name in the animal kingdom), mostly indigenous to Madagascar with a few on the African mainland and fewer in Asia. Their taxonomy reflected their similarity and the fact that they possessed more primitive features than do monkeys. Made sense to me.

Well that’s no longer the case. All extant so-called prosimians are now part of two suborders, Strepsirrhini and Haplorrhini. Modern science has determined that the two suborders’ relationship is paraphyletic and so people like me who use the term ‘prosimian’ are guaranteed to be scoffed at by naturalists in the know. That’s reason enough for me not to try to pick up chicks at a primatology convention. I’d still tap Jane Goodall, but I’m not bragging about it.

Did you know that Pluto is a planet again? Well it is, sort of. Pluto is now considered a dwarf planet, the second largest dwarf planet, in fact, right behind Eris, and the largest member of a population of bodies in the Solar System known as the Kuiper Belt. There are actually five dwarf planets; Pluto, Eris, Ceres, Haumea and Makemake (and I am not making that last one up). I guess it would be six if you count the Death Star. I was very, very comfortable knowing there were nine planets orbiting the sun. I don’t need fucking dwarf planets. How long will it be before they prefer to be called little people planets?

I don’t know where Eris is. It’s bigger than Pluto. It must have a zip code. I think it’s in Montana but I could be wrong. I have a friend who knows all about shit that doesn’t happen on earth – string theory, curved space, fucking nebulae and what-have you. I’ll ask him about Eris. He drinks like a fish so he might just make something up whether he actually knows anything about Eris or not. Plus he’s in his forties, like me, so he might just string me a load of crap:

“Oh Eris, yes, umm, Eris, you see, is a dwarf planet with the formal designation 136199 ERIS and it’s the ninth largest object known to orbit the sun directly. It has a mass 27 percent larger than Pluto and there’s a cocktail lounge in the capital city of Mylon where they make an unrivaled old fashioned. If you go there, tell Garzag the Barzoolian I said hi.”

God damned proto-monkeys with new classifications, midget planetoids, fucking bugs with fancy titles. Christ almighty. Could we maybe leave an already analyzed universe alone for a while? I want planets to be planets, insects to be insects, prosimians to be what they are, milk to be good for me and sex to be had horizontally. Of course that’s just me and I’m aging ungracefully. But whatever.