Me, I went along to the doctor and sat in the waiting room with my scribble book desperately trying to figure out what to name the planet in my novel. It seems a simple thing really, but I am at a complete standstill and have convinced myself not to go forward until I can give a name to this place. I think it might help me understand it better and describe it more accurately.
As I say, it seems a simple thing, and as I mentioned once before, even God had to enlist the help of Adam when it came to naming the creatures He had just finished making. I have three notebook pages jam packed with names I have compiled over the last several weeks. None of them seems right. I have recently taken to writing down word endings…. ing, ite, ers, une, ure, ia, lin, ain, ise, ness, and so forth and so on as possible endings to draw from while making up some name.
I listed the names of our own planets in this solar system, noted that they are all Greeky Romany Latiny names, except Earth. I don’t know what it means. I looked it up in the BIG dictionary and it comes from Old English, but it does not give a meaning. I always thought it was such a lovely name, Earth. Soft, feminine. Mother Earth. I was especially taken with the pronunciation guide in the dictionary.. “ rth ”. I loved that. I come from the planet ….. rth ……
While sitting in the waiting room, bent over my notebook, I became aware of a young woman who sat down near me and immediately got on her cell phone and ordered a salad from a local restaurant. “I would like a Spinach salad with butter lettuce. Yes, in 15 minutes. And I want double dill dressing. No sprouts. Yes, the Spinach salad with no spinach. Butter lettuce. I know it’s kind of funny, but I order it like that all the time. Thank you.”
I’m thinking, Spinach Salad with no spinach. Okee dokee. You got it. You’re the boss.
Click, phone got stowed in chic little black purse. Her name was called. She was pencil thin, dressed all in black, streaky blond hair pulled back into a pony tail. The nurse mentioned that since she is going on a trip, they would make sure she has her medication ready to take with her, as they disappear into the bowels of the inner office.
For some reason, I would not like to be around when things don’t go just as planned for this young woman. It might get ugly REAL fast.
But there I was left sitting in my ill fitting navy blue pants that I have owned for 7 or 8 years that ride up when I am sitting and show a portion of bare leg above my teal green socks that have seen better days, scratching my head while leafing back and forth through my notebook considering and rejecting name after name for my planet.
Spinach salad with no spinach…… good god.
I wonder what SHE would call HER alien planet?
“Let’s call it Sproutlia. With no sprouts. And don’t argue with me either!”
An elderly gentleman sat down and said a few friendly words and we laughed. It ran through my mind to ask him what he would name an alien planet. But I didn’t want to reveal that I am writing a book. It seemed so pretentious a thing to say to a stranger. But this is how far out on a limb I feel about the whole business. I am ready to ask complete strangers obscure questions in doctor’s waiting rooms.
And don’t tell me to leave it blank and come back to it later. I HAVE left it blank for months and this IS the dreaded, mythical, later ! I may have made a grave mistake. That nice old gentleman might have known the name and I was just too chicken to ask him. I now have to live with the fact that I may have let a COSMIC EVENT slip through my fingers by being such an introvert.
Do ALL introverts miss their cosmic events? Now I’m depressed.
And I STILL don’t have a name for my planet!!!
When we got home, I made the error of mentioning to Hub man what I was working on, and he immediately said to call it “Melmac”…. Which I think comes from some TV show. I informed him that I was NOT writing a Douglas Adams novel, and shouldn’t he be lying down on the couch and keeping quiet or something?
No wonder it took Tolkien 15 years to write Lord of the Rings. I bet he spent the first 2 deciding on the name “Frodo”. Which frankly is not that inspiring a name. But Samwise Gamgee, now THERE is a name for you.
That name is a stroke of genius.
Long silent pause . . . Maybe he got that name from a wise old man who lived in the belfry at the college where he worked. The same old wise man who never came out of the belfry except for midnight mass on Christmas Eve, and wrote esoteric texts on middle English prose from crumbling parchment manuscripts that he had stolen from a castle in the wilds of Scotland when he was a lad of 13.
Ya think?
You know what?
I’ll bet Tolkien got it out of the phone book.