I received a lovely message from my friend Paul this week, asking if I could expand on the theories I expounded in last week’s essay on Milk. He phrased it more succinctly than that. He said, “What on Earth are you talking about?”
The question interested me because he had taken the trouble to capitalise the word Earth, a grammatical detail that is often missed when citing our planet in common phrases, like ‘what on Earth’ and ‘Did the Earth move for you?’ The confusion lies in whether we’re referring to Planet Earth or the brown stuff that coats it. In cases like ‘down to earth’ and ‘salt of the earth’ it’s open to debate? You could argue that the concept of the Earth moving might refer to either too, especially if you’re operating a JCB at the time.
Of course, back in the Dark Ages when the planet got its name, they didn’t realise it was a planet. So the earth that you grubbed about in for turnips naturally extended to be the Earth that was everything, the be all and end all, until you reached the edge and fell off into the mouth of a dragon, at which point it didn’t really matter what you called it.
Imagine if we were naming our planet today; we probably wouldn’t call it Earth. We’d pay some agency several billion pounds to carry out a rebranding exercise and, having researched the market and found that the word ‘earth’ is already in common use for mud, they’d call it something more distinctive like Marillion or T’Pau or maybe Duran Duran.
Alternatively, we could save the money and follow the example of rest of the Solar System by naming it after a Roman deity. You’ve got Mercury, the messenger of the gods, Venus, the goddess of love, Mars, the god of war, Jupiter, the king of the gods, Saturn, the god of agriculture, Neptune, the god of the sea, and Uranus, the god of, um… of er…
So we could choose a new one like Cupid, the god of love, and that would help us to distinguish between the planet and the soil. Someone will probably write in to tell me that Cupid is already the name of a jolly green giant orbiting in the outer kershaw of the extragalactic manilow, but wouldn’t it be nice if it wasn’t?
“Did the Cupid move for you, dear?”
“No. What on Marillion are you talking about?
