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| Gaywings (Polygala paucifolia) blossom by Jomegat via Wikimedia Commons |
These are gaywings. (I know, right? But that's a whole other blog post... ) But they're also called fringed polygala, from their Latin name Polygala paucifolia. They’re one of about 500 species of milkwort, a genus traditionally believed to increase milk production in cattle. That’s where the genus name Polygala comes from: poly is Greek for “much” and gala meas “milk”. And that’s about where fringed polygala stops being interesting (you can read more about it here if you're really keen). But I didn't know that gala was Greek for “milk”, so I started thinking about what other words we see it in. There aren’t many, as it turns out (the party-version of “gala” seems to have its etymological roots in Arabic), but it turns up again in the word “galaxy”. Here’s why:
In Greek myth, Zeus, an inveterate womanizer, had many children by a variety of mortal women. Being particularly fond of his son Heracles (later Romanized to Hercules), he wanted to make him immortal. So he snuck the baby onto Hera's breast while she was sleeping. Heracles was apparently a little overzealous in his feeding, and when he bit Hera’s nipple, she woke up and shoved him off, spraying milk across the sky. It took a few attempts on his life, the violent death of his family and 12 labours before Hera finally forgave Heracles, but meanwhile, this stream of breast milk shooting across the heavens formed the galaxias kyklos (literally "milky circle”), inspiring artists for centuries to come.
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| Jacopo Tintoretto, Die Entstehung der Milchstraße (1575) |
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| Peter Paul Rubens, El nacimiento de la Vía Láctea (1636) |
Though originally intended to signify only our own local grouping of stars, the term “galaxy” was eventually applied to all such collections (astronomers use an uppercase “Galaxy” when referring to our own, and a lower case “galaxy” to signify galaxies in general). It wasn’t until the late 1300s that Chaucer coined the English expression Milky Way, in reference to the "Galaxye".
So there you have it: Hera falls asleep for one minute and before you know it, a bunch of dudes have named the biggest things in the universe after her breast milk. So I guess the moral of the story is, no matter what, it all comes down to boobies?
