Sunday 2 December 2012

The Classical flying Spaghetti monster

So, how what do you call someone scared of the Flying Spaghetti Monster?

The Greek wikipedia gives the flying spaghetti monster as Ιπτάμενο Μακαρονοτέρας (iptamevo makaroteras). By the process of elimination, the first word is flying*. The second word is rather interesting: makaro sounds like maccaroni, while the second part is τέρας, τέρεος (Ionic)/τέρατος (Koine), monster like in teratoma (a really weird ovarian cancer with many different tissue types, including hair and bone). So in Greek the Spaghetti monster is actually a macaroni monster.
So the fear of the Spaghetti Monster is macaroteratophobia.

Spaghetti-monstrous sounds nice, but what could the Greek adjective be?
Interestingly, τέρας has two meanings one means a marvel, the other a monster —which makes sense as everyone marvels at a monster, albeit in horror and not in awe. So in Greek, the spaghetti monster is also a marvel!
Searching τέρας on the OED gives many medical terms such as hemitery, terata, teratology and teratogenesis, which have to do with misshapen organisms. It also contains the adjective teretical (adj, Relating to marvels or prodigies) and the noun teratism (n. love of the marvellous or prodigious, or monstrosity). Amusingly, the word teretical sounds like the word heretical, which is unrelated, which make sense as all religions other than pastafarianism are heretical and not the other way round —in light of the above, another way of saying pastafarianism could be macaroteratism.
I think macaroteretical sounds rather nice, even though Spaghetti-monstrous is more intuitive.

Another amusing thing is that macaronic means jumbled, mingled and macaronic Latin is a the jumbled Latin (Monty Python's "Romanes eunt domus" scene). It is an odd coincidence, though, given that the flying spaghetting monster is not made up at all…




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*) Google confirms. It is one of those words that differs in modern Greek from classical Greek. Attic masculine present participles end in -ων, but modern Greek has different endings, so that makes sense. ίπταμαι turns out to be a "late" spelling of πέτομαι via ἵπταμαι (Perseus) —I think late here means Koine, so not late at all.