Roanoke Times
Copyright (c) 1995, Landmark Communications, Inc.
DATE: THURSDAY, February 4, 1993 TAG: 9302030157
SECTION: EXTRA PAGE: 1 EDITION: METRO
SOURCE: Joel Achenbach
DATELINE: LENGTH: Long
CONSTELLATION NAMES BEAR A LOT OF THOUGHT
Q: Why did ancients decide that constellations of stars look like bears and crabs and horses and so forth even though you can stare at them for hours and not see anything that remotely resembles a bear or a crab or a horse?A: There are only a few constellations that make any sense. The Big Dipper is clearly a big dipper (though the ancients bizarrely called it Ursa Major, Latin for "a major bear"). Scorpius is effectively scorpion-like. Orion does have a nifty belt-and-sword ensemble. Cygnus is vaguely swan-like. The rest are ridiculous. (The Milky Way doesn't look anything like a candy bar!)
Why such craziness?
A preliminary thought: The ancients didn't have streetlights or smog. With clearer air, they saw more stars. The Big Dipper actually has 227 visible stars, not just the big seven we see at night in the city and the suburbs. So some constellations, seen in full on a clear night, may have looked slightly more like a mythological figure or creature.
But here's our real answer: The ancients probably did not think the constellations look like mythological figures or bears or soldiers or whatnot any more than we do. They simply needed a way to discuss the night sky, in the same way that "Florida" is a way to discuss the location of "Gainesville."
Indeed, this is why modern astronomers still refer to Orion and Cassiopeia and Hercules and so forth: When talking about stars and galaxies and quasars, you have to have some way of identifying where these things are in the sky.
We are a naming species. We give ourselves names, our cities names, even our dogs names. No other creature does this as far as we know, and it's certainly not necessary. Admit it: There's no reason you couldn't just refer to your dog as "The Dog." If you have two dogs they can be Dog 1 and Dog 2. You prefer to give things names, though, because its makes them more familiar in the literal sense.
"They were looking up and seeing a sky full of stars and faced with the problem of naming them in some way," says Jim Sharp, director of the Smithsonian Institution's planetarium.
But now let's look more closely at the dippers: Why bears? Bears don't have long tails, as do the two ursine constellations. The early Germans wisely thought they were looking at wagons, the medieval Brits called them ploughs, but many ancient peoples - the Greeks, Phoenicians, Babylonians, Hebrews and Arabs - insisted they were bears. One theory is that since the dippers are in the far northern sky, circumnavigating the Pole Star, ancients may have associated them with bears, which Aristotle believed were the only creatures who could survive in the frozen north.
What's most startling is that the Algonquin Indians of North America also saw the Big Dipper as a bear (though the "tail" was, in their case, three hunters, with only the four stars of the bowl being the bear itself).
How could the bear image arise independently on both sides of the Atlantic prior to Columbus? Some scholars of star lore raise the possibility that the bear imagery may have been carried over to North America from Asia by the ancestors of the American Indians, but this seems like a stretch.
A final theory notes that in Sanskrit, the word "Riksha" can mean either "bear" or "star," depending on how it is used. The two dippers are the most arresting constellations in the sky; somehow, perhaps, the ancients of the Old World became confused and the bright stars became bright bears. Another stretch, but at least it fits our general view that human history is just a giant misunderstanding.
Q: Why don't malls have shopping carts?
A: The obvious answer - that you don't need a cart - is simply absurd. A serious consumer needs a cart, especially between Thanksgiving and Christmas. Whereas the casual, occasional shopper thinks a shopping cart would be a useless frill in a mall, a serious consumer thinks that perhaps a front-end loader would be helpful.
We initially assumed that carts aren't classy enough for malls. You can't picture yourself wheeling a cart down the aisle at Saks Fifth Avenue or Neiman Marcus. You want to stride into those stores like you're entering a fashionable party, because there's nothing quite as ego-crushing as seeing those clerks with the perfume and cologne samples turn away with that expression that says, "Oh no, another rube."
Then we got two better reasons from Harold Carlson, a shopping center consultant, who points out that shopping carts are a pain in the neck. They are a hazard in parking lots, and they wind up in weird places, like drainage ditches. "I just see them causing more trouble than they're worth," he says.
But he says the ultimate reason is simply an administrative one. Shopping carts are an artifact of single stores. In a mall, who would own the cart? The mall itself could operate them, but then the little shoe stores and knickknack stores would complain, because they wouldn't want to share in the maintenance cost.
Come to think of it, here's one last reason: You can't take a shopping cart up the escalators. Every mall with any semblance of self-respect has escalators. These two things were probably invented about the same year, they are inseparable. "Mall" is to "escalator" as "fridge" is to "ancient nearly empty bottle of salad dressing."
Washington Post Writers Group
Joel Achenbach writes for the Style section of the Washington Post.