It ain't Smokey "the" Bear and it ain't "the" Earth!!

On Apr 20, 9:51 pm, "Martin R. Howell"
wrote:

What do you people think of this little point? I always thought that
our planet is named simply, "Earth." So, when I hear something is
good for "the" Earth, I am given to wonder what might be good for
"the" Jupiter, or "the" Venus. Am I getting all worked up over
nothing?

You live on a world.

That world is the only world that any human being could live on for
all but a vanishingly small fraction of human history.

This world is divided into parts - the oceans, the land, and the
atmosphere. The only oceans, land, or atmosphere that people used to
know even existed.

There were planets - stars in the sky that didn't stay put like the
rest, but which wandered around the Zodiac. They were points of light
in the sky, and that's all anyone knew about them.

The oceans of our world, the land, and the air made up the only world
we knew. Since we live on the land, and the soil beneath our feet is
where we grow the food we eat, just as we speak of "a day" for a
period of 24 hours that includes both day and night (a nyctemeron to
the Greeks) we called our world the Earth. The land, the only land
there is to stand on and live on.

We gave those little points of light in the sky names too. We named
them after gods - whether Marduk and Nergal, or Jupiter and Mars.
There were several of them, though, and while each one was special in
its own way, they weren't unique. But there was only one Sun, and one
Moon, the Sun and the Moon.

The Sun and the Moon, seen in the sky of the Earth.

If the English language had come into existence *after* we were a
society with a clear concept that the planets are worlds like our own,
they have natural satellites like ours, and the other stars in the
night sky are suns as well, then we wouldn't be having this
discussion, since then our planet would only be a world among many
others.

John Savard

In

"Martin R. Howell" wrote:

What do you people think of this little point? I always thought that
our planet is named simply, "Earth."

I recall a SciFi story from my youth which included a comment (vaguely
recalled) from some alien:

"A strange people; they call their planet Dirt."

--
Bert Hyman St. Paul, MN

On Apr 24, 7:09 am, Bert Hyman wrote:

"Martin R. Howell" wrote:

What do you people think of this little point? I always thought that
our planet is named simply, "Earth."

I recall a SciFi story from my youth which included a comment (vaguely
recalled) from some alien:

"A strange people; they call their planet Dirt."

I vaguely recall it too; at least the author didn't succump to ghe
temptation to exploit the matter further by having the other alien
look up from his measurements of the Earth's atmospheric composition
to reply,

"Yes, and they treat it like that, too."

John Savard