I have heard (though not confirmed) that the name "black hole" is not used for black holes in Russia because translated literally, it has an, um, anatomical meaning. They say "frozen stars" instead.
But now comes word that the phrase is also offensive in English, too! But I don’t think renaming them to "super high gravity locations" is good either, though I think I could get used to call them SHGLs, as long as I can pronounce it "shaggles".
Tip o’ the event horizon to Fark.
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Phil Plait, the creator of Bad Astronomy, is an astronomer, lecturer, and author. After ten years working on Hubble Space Telescope and six more working on astronomy education, he struck out on his own as a writer. He has written two books, dozens of magazine articles, and 12 bazillion blog articles. He is a skeptic, and fights misuses of science as well as praising the wonder of real science.
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June 22nd, 2007 at 10:06 am
Sounds like political correctness gone mad to me….
June 22nd, 2007 at 10:08 am
DOH! Never thought I’d ever get caught out by a parody site!
I blame it on the fact I was distracted watching shuttle coverage
June 22nd, 2007 at 10:13 am
What’s next. White star of challenged stature.
June 22nd, 2007 at 10:14 am
It’s a spoof! But on the other hand, I wouldn’t be altogether surprised if it were real…
June 22nd, 2007 at 10:16 am
Oh, and perhaps we should also think of a new name for White Dwarf. And Moon is pretty risque, too, not to mention Uranus.
June 22nd, 2007 at 10:17 am
Whatever happened to “collapsar” (COLLAPSed stAR), btw?
June 22nd, 2007 at 10:19 am
Looks suspiciously like a hoax to me, the french equivalent given is just ungrammatical : ‘emplacements de hauts gravité super’ should be ‘emplacements de gravité extrème’ or ‘emplacements de gravité super-haute’.
And IIRC when John Wheeler coined the term ‘black hole’, and the phrase ‘black holes have no hair’ he was perhaps obliquely referring to the seventh planet of our solar system.
June 22nd, 2007 at 10:35 am
I was halfway through passing this on to some friends when I noticed the tagline “The Standard of Excellence in Pseudojournalism”. D’oh!
Some other recent headlines:
“Running With Scissors Now Federal Offense”
“Australia Now An Island, Greenland Miffed”
“Hooters Adds Breasts”
“Army Successfully Tests F-Bomb”
Good thing I was only HALFWAY THROUGH passing it on!
June 22nd, 2007 at 10:44 am
You really should be careful with things like this. Before following the link, I thought it might have been real, and I decided the world had finally gotten too stupid.
I had three of the five safety interlocks on my doomsday device opened before following the link and realizing it was a joke.
As for why I thought it could be real, well, here’s a link:
http://www.cnn.com/2003/TECH/ptech/11/26/master.term.reut/
June 22nd, 2007 at 10:48 am
The late Dr. Robert Forward made this assertion (about Russian ideas of propriety) in the opening chapter of his book Dragon’s Egg:
“Jacqueline!” Sawlinski said, his face beaming with pleasure. “Do come in, young lady. How is your thesis work coming? Have you found another collapsed sub-stellar object?”
Jacqueline grinned inwardly at the Russian’s refusal to call them minature black holes. Unfortunately, the Americans and Englishmen who had first popularized the concept of black holes were not aware that the phrase “black hole” had a context in the Russian language that was not used in polite company.
June 22nd, 2007 at 11:11 am
Are you going to start posting articles from the Onion as factual, as well?
June 22nd, 2007 at 11:23 am
So this is not for real????
I did hear that we are not allowed to refer to black bin bags or blackboards. I also suspect that black-ice will be renamed icy surfaces
June 22nd, 2007 at 11:27 am
Folks, please note the category under which this is posted. I refuse to spoonfeed everyone!
June 22nd, 2007 at 11:40 am
Well, I have been dumped on for referring to master/slave hard drives and master/slave directories in the X.500 world because some overly sensitive people imagine offence when they hear the term.
It’s not a huge leap from that to this.
June 22nd, 2007 at 11:57 am
Well, as I understand the news is not true and I would say unfortunately not true.
I mean have you been ever confronted by people, who’s first language is not English, and are also very interested in Astronomy? Every time I get my first question about “black holes” … it’s very uncomfortable situation.
To the other end, it’s not a correct representation of the object in English either …
June 22nd, 2007 at 12:01 pm
That’s the thing with the best satire sites, they need to be just a hair the other side of reality. Take the good old Landover Baptist Church, if you blog about anything on that site you can be certain to get some people very upset because they think it’s real
June 22nd, 2007 at 12:08 pm
The Tarrkid: “Australia Now An Island, Greenland Miffedâ€
Just ask any Australian which island is the largest in the world and prepare yourself on a discussion of the difference between a continent and an island.
June 22nd, 2007 at 12:16 pm
Well, wouldn’t eurasia be the largest island then? or maybe south/north america, since they are connect (barely). Unless you count a cannel.
June 22nd, 2007 at 12:21 pm
Phil said:
Folks, please note the category under which this is posted. I refuse to spoonfeed everyone!
Keep in mind that people reading the blog through aggregators do not see the categories or tags or anything like that. I wasn’t fooled but did click through to see what the comments were.
June 22nd, 2007 at 12:29 pm
“Black holes suck; white holes BLOW.”
June 22nd, 2007 at 12:32 pm
I don’t remember having any problems with the name «black hole». We are calling black holes black holes in both informal and scientific writing, so some misinterpretation must have taken place. Sorry if i lack humour, but i had to note that )
June 22nd, 2007 at 12:42 pm
Ah, Alex, good point. Still, the site itself makes it pretty clear it’s satire.
June 22nd, 2007 at 12:59 pm
I’ve always liked the term ‘dark star’ myself. Sounds more ominous.
June 22nd, 2007 at 1:16 pm
I did a year of college in Russia (as an astronomy major) and I can assure you that “black hole” is not offensive in Russian. Russians use the term “chyornaya dyra”, which is a pretty much a literal translation. I heard this canard before (it was repeated by Gregory Benford in an interview) and I’d really like to know how it originated. Was “Dragon’s Egg?” the first known mention?
June 22nd, 2007 at 2:41 pm
Maybe a better alternative term would be Black Objects not Observed Turning Yellow (BOOTYs). That should prevent us offending anyone.
“Icy surfaces” would technically be more accurate.
June 22nd, 2007 at 2:43 pm
Just call em Life-Suckin Singularities and be done with it
)
June 22nd, 2007 at 2:43 pm
Don’t worry, Black Holes aren’t racist, It’ll crush you whatever you are if you are in it’s path.
I myself like the ‘Dark Star’ name, it sounds more mysterious than black hole.
June 22nd, 2007 at 2:55 pm
Can you imagine the whining if top and bottom quarks had been named truth and beauty as was once suggested (truth being the opposite of beauty)?
it’s no worse than charm/strange, and yet people don’t like it
There are people who go out of their way to be offended. The world should not accomodate them.
June 22nd, 2007 at 3:00 pm
satire website, I’m sure
June 22nd, 2007 at 3:21 pm
The problem with parodying extreme political correctness is that it doesn’t take much looking to find a suggestion that’s even more out to lunch — except that the person making the suggestion is dead serious.
June 22nd, 2007 at 3:45 pm
Good satire.
Reminds me of the first year I taught Astronomy at my high school. My students had to do a presentation on an astronomy topic of their choice. Two students choose black holes and did a Google search. I turned around to see one of them diving in front of the monitor as they had pulled up a porn site. I reminded them to use a site that concentrated on astronomy.
June 22nd, 2007 at 6:19 pm
“Frozen Star” is the name of a book on black holes by George Greenstein. As I’m sure you know.
Tho’ it was lo these many years ago, I remember it being quite a cool book.
June 22nd, 2007 at 6:33 pm
political correctness is now making a victim of the scientific community, what next. you know there are those that complain just to be a thorn but this take not only the cake but the whole dam bakery
its BLACK, light cant escape. its a HOLE, in space-time, ence BLACK HOLE, what more do you want. i believe the term or atleast concept came about in the late 1700’s. and i dont think for one nano-sec that the sci-fi community is going to change what they call these things
its BLACK HOLE – not black ho, mmmmm Kay
June 22nd, 2007 at 7:25 pm
I am a russian speaking american, born in former USSR; I’ve never heard of “frozen stars”. From what I know, we use the same terminology, “Black Holes”.
June 22nd, 2007 at 10:02 pm
We were told at work on a compulsory valuing diversity course that we should not criticise political correctness in anyway shape or form as it is trying to do the right thing.
That is therefore official policy for where I work.
So no criticising political correctness here or you will be subject to re-education.
So maybe we should use another descriptor for this phenomenon, so henceforth they must be called SHGL or else…
June 22nd, 2007 at 11:34 pm
I thought the term was ‘hypermass’.
In any case… Fooled me for minute. The letters page gave it away, though.
Man… This is the 2nd time a parody site has fooled me. Just for a bit.
PfA
June 23rd, 2007 at 11:21 am
“White Dwarf Star”
:naughty:
June 23rd, 2007 at 11:52 am
According to the Russian Wikipedia, black holes are called exactly that in Russian. I too wonder how this myth started.
June 23rd, 2007 at 2:11 pm
Sad that this could be true, isn’t it?
June 24th, 2007 at 6:57 am
Bill Bones said: (on June 22nd, 2007 at 10:17 am)
“Whatever happened to “collapsar†(COLLAPSed stAR), btw?”
Well that term covers neutron stars, pulsars, magnetars and even white dwarf’s to some extent as well. They’re all object where matter has been super-compressed into a ..er ..”degenerate” (in the physic’s-al NOT moral sense of the word) state if not even further into a singularity…
Even dead red dwarfs (NOT meaning really small deceased Russian individuals!
.. ) could qualify albeit there won’t be any of them formed til much, much later – like 1 trillion years or so ..
Black Hole – singularity / Dark / Frozen Star at least those are clear.
There was I gather another Black Hole in Calcutta – amazingly our Earth survived!
Dwarf , giant etc … un-PC ? Surely even the most um … intellectually challenged … shall we say devotee of political correctness can see the difference between astronomical descriptive term and personal racist invective.
That said, would white dwarf *, yellow dwarf, red dwarf be any less offensive terms to European descended, Asian & Amerindian people of ..um short stature either … ??? (Shhh don’t tell the humour challenged!)
Oh dear, once you start for things that you can read offence into the options are inhibited only by a lack of imagination …
Fortunately, the majority of folk do have a sense of humour and a sense of proportion.
Some also will always do what Aussies call taking the (oh no can’t say that!) out of such pompous puritanitanical purility!
I’m glad to hear this was a case of the latter.
—————————–
* ‘White dwarf’ is confusing because Sirius A -like Vega, Altair, Fomalhaut & other white main-seqeunce stars etc .. could also qualify as being “white dwarfs” (on “blue / yellow / orange / red dwarf lines) although very different from the usual ‘white dwarfs’ eg. Sirius B, Procyon B, Van Maanen’s Star, etc. I suggest the IAU advises people to call white main-sequence dwarf stars ‘Sirian’ stars & yellow-white main-sequence stars Procyonese’ to avoid such confusion – although I’d rather they reversed the Pluto demotion first!
Or would ‘White dwarf’ be better reserved for Sirius A Dogstar type stars and stars like “The Pup” (Sirious B) be betetrrebnamed White Pygmies!?
June 24th, 2007 at 7:41 pm
Fool me once… shame on… … shame on you. Fool me twice… … … … … … … … … … … … … … … … … … … … … … … … … … … … … … … … … … … … … … … … … … … … … … … … … … … … … … … … … … … … … … … … … … … … … … … … … … … … … … … you can’t get fooled again.
June 24th, 2007 at 8:02 pm
Just to be on the safe side, I refer to White Dwarfs as “vertically challenged Caucasian stars”…
June 26th, 2007 at 4:08 am
We use to have Harassment Training here at work, but apparently they didn’t feel the name was good enough, so now it’s Non-Harassment Training.
June 27th, 2007 at 7:19 am
This weekend I was reading a sci-fi story from the late 50’s. I forget the name of the story (damn brain!), kept talking about ‘collapsars’ and I think they were referencing black holes.
Maybe.
July 20th, 2007 at 5:41 am
What? What is sh..t?! “Frozen Star”? Oh, my Lord! My nationals don’t know about this!
=))))
In Russia, Black Star meaning Black Star (Cheornaya Deira). Not anatomical meaning! Only astronomical!
Learn Russian! Prove to useful! =)))
July 11th, 2008 at 8:16 am
It now has become a reality
http://www.foxnews.com/story/0,2933,380143,00.html
July 14th, 2008 at 9:08 am
You can wish it was fake, but it isn’t. John Wiley Price is dead serious about it. He has been a power in Dallas County politics for decades and has made sillier points.
July 16th, 2008 at 12:45 pm
White is white, black is black, grey is the color of the moon. Anyone who objects to the term “black hole” is ignorant of the rationale for the term. Black in physics is the total absence of color, and in the case of a black hole, nothing escapes except for quite possibly Hawking radiation.
Therefore any correlation between a tangible entity on planet earth which tends to absorb all within its grasp leaving no evidence of a previous existence has nothing to do with race. To assume otherwise is the sign of an unschooled Ignoramus.
Call me politically correct!