![[personal profile]](https://www.dreamwidth.org/img/silk/identity/user.png){kind=small}
You gave us a Latin name?
Aug. 7th, 2003 01:57 pmThe arrogance of humanity is absolutely stunning. They're still running around naming every species they run into-- including the plant and animal and nanite and energy and silicon and every other form of life-- with a dead language from their long-past history.
Of course generally speaking they seem to be giving species names based on their own words for themselves. I can only imagine what they named the Klingons. Klingonus semisapiens? (Okay, that's not what they named them, but they should have.)
So I decided to see what they named us. "Deolus ludens" : playing little gods.
Little gods?
Who play?
I said something to Riker one time about the sentience of species being defined by the complexity of their games. So I suppose Riker's behind this. Either that or the line made it into a report and someone else thought it would be funny to name us for it.
The Organians are "Deolus pacans" -- little gods who make peace. Yeah, right. How humanicentric.
But on the other hand I think I'd rather be well known for the quality of my games than something boring like making peace. :-)
Who got the idea of putting us all in the same taxonomic genus anyway? We're not actually related. Not to the Organians, anyway. We're distantly related to the Douwd but in the same sense that all human mammals are related.
But little gods? I'm omnipotent. How would you go about defining a big god?
Okay, so I will put up with "petit dieu", but deolus sounds like something Crusher would treat with a hypospray. And that's why Latin is a dead language and French isn't. Latin, to put it bluntly, sucks. (What kind of language takes the concept "beauty" and makes it into the word "pulchritudina?")
Of course generally speaking they seem to be giving species names based on their own words for themselves. I can only imagine what they named the Klingons. Klingonus semisapiens? (Okay, that's not what they named them, but they should have.)
So I decided to see what they named us. "Deolus ludens" : playing little gods.
Little gods?
Who play?
I said something to Riker one time about the sentience of species being defined by the complexity of their games. So I suppose Riker's behind this. Either that or the line made it into a report and someone else thought it would be funny to name us for it.
The Organians are "Deolus pacans" -- little gods who make peace. Yeah, right. How humanicentric.
But on the other hand I think I'd rather be well known for the quality of my games than something boring like making peace. :-)
Who got the idea of putting us all in the same taxonomic genus anyway? We're not actually related. Not to the Organians, anyway. We're distantly related to the Douwd but in the same sense that all human mammals are related.
But little gods? I'm omnipotent. How would you go about defining a big god?
Okay, so I will put up with "petit dieu", but deolus sounds like something Crusher would treat with a hypospray. And that's why Latin is a dead language and French isn't. Latin, to put it bluntly, sucks. (What kind of language takes the concept "beauty" and makes it into the word "pulchritudina?")