Theres a move to call the recent few thousand years of earth history the Anthropocene, defined (but vaguely dated) as when human activities had a significant global impact on the Earths ecosystems. Whether it makes any sense to give a geological age-name to a blink of years on a planet billions of years old (... the flake of gold paint on the top of the flagpole on top of the Empire State Building ...) is one open question. It already has a name, the holocene. That was given in the 19th century when the depth of time in the history of the world was only dimly understood. The new name swaps out the holo- for anthro-, as though it means age of man (which is how its described in some headlines). But it doesnt. Holocene is from Greek holos whole + -cene new. It is the entirely new age of the world, when all the modern aspects are present; rather an anthropocentric view of things as science goes. Holocene was a late addition to the set of geological age-names worked out by Charles Lyell, the geologist, and William Whewell, whose job description is polymath and who was one of the most remarkable Englishmen of his age. Geologists in the early 1800s had begun to fit together the fossils sufficiently to portion out the Earths life story over time; they sought names for the epochs, and they turned to classical languages to coin them. For the age that began after the demise of the dinosaurs, and introduced the recent species, they fetched for words to express degrees of newness. At first they looked to -neous, from Greek neos new to supply the words, and the newly minted eras could have been the eoneous, the meioneous, and the pleioneous. But Whewell steered them away from those, in part because they seemed too much like erroneous. Instead he proposed -cene, a Latinized form of another Greek word for new. In a letter to Lyell, Jan. 31, 1831, he added a PS: It has occurred to me that [kainos] is a better word than [neos], and I propose for your terms, 1 acene, 2 eocene, 3 miocene, 4 pliocene. ... For eocene you might say spaniocene, but I like your eo better. Is not this shortest and best? (Oligocene and Pleistocene were added later as geologists refined the scale. Kainos also had a cousin in Latin, which forms the second element of English recent, from Latin recens lately done or made.) As the letter suggests, Whewell worked with the original suggestions of the geologists, refining them politely and adding the varnish of scholarship, but aiming more for simplicity and clarity than classical correctness. Correctly, I think, but this earned him the scorn of the purists, such as Fowler, who called miocene A typical example of the monstrosities with which scientific men in want of a label for something, and indifferent to all beyond their own province, defile the language. The elements of the word are Greek, but not the way they are put together, nor the meaning demanded of the compound. So: Eocene the dawn of the recent Miocene the less recent Pliocene the more recent One wonders what thunder Fowler would hurl at anthropocene, literally the human recent or perhaps the newly human.
Posted on: Wed, 15 Oct 2014 01:45:27 +0000