Hi Enchilada & All,
Just read the essay at the link you supplied and find myself broadly in agreement on virtually everything.
I do like the idea of naming the stars of the Cross after the cardinal virtues, though perhaps in order to bring them into line with the truly old and traditional star names we ought to put them in Arabic, translate them (badly or poorly) into Greek and then re-translate into Latin and then anglicize the Latin? [please visualise a "tounge-in-cheek emoticon" here]
See the (not unusual) case on Betelgeuse here on Wiki:
http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Betelgeuse
under the heading Etymology for a bit of potted history on how its name has be continually "*******ised" over the millenia.
I still wonder how Delta Velorum missed out on a name -- not to mention how Gamma Velorum (Regor -- Roger backwards for Roger Chaffey of Apollo 1) missed out until the 1960s ...
Off star names momentarily and on to optical designs, another astronomical "what cheeses me off" I acquired (caught) early in my astronomy career from Steven Lee, relates to
Cassegrain.
For decades if not centuries it was:
Newton =
Newtonian
Cassegrain =
Cassegrainian
But, for the last 20-odd years all I hear is Cassegrain -- even worse, when imaging, people refer to it as "prime focus" when they mean the
Cassegrainian focus.
Why are Schmidt-Cassegrain telescopes not called
Schmidt-Cassegrainians.
Maybe it just doesn't fit in the advertising, or its "too much of a mouthfull"
This (unlike Mimosa-Becrux) is one I
want dead before I die ...
Best,
Les D