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COMMENTARY
Is it “the earth” or Earth?
A.M. Celâl Şengör, İTÜ Maden Fakültesi, Jeoloji Bölümü,
and Avrasya Yerbilimleri Enstitüsü, Ayazağa 34469 İstanbul,
Turkey, sengor@itu.edu.tr
Student:
But each word, I think, should harbour some idea
Mephistopheles:
Yes, yes, indeed, but don’t torment yourself too much
because precisely where no thought is present,
a word appears in proper time.
Words are priceless in an argument,
Words are building stones of Systems.
It’s splendid to believe in words;
from words you cannot rob a single letter.
— J.W. von Goethe, Faust
As a non-English speaker I was taught that when referring to
our planet, native speakers say and/or write “the earth.” I won-
dered why all other planets have capitalised names with no defi-
nite article preceding them, but not ours. Moreover, both our satel-
lite and the star have definite articles in front of their names,
although their names are capitalised: the Moon and the Sun.
Years later, in the Department of Geosciences in the University
of Houston, where I had started my undergraduate education, my
good friend Mrs. Irene “Cookie” Jones, a senior graduate student
in the same department, asked me why all planet names are capi-
talised, but not ours. I had no idea. Cookie answered it for me:
because all other planets carry proper names; they are names of
Greek and Roman gods. Our planet also has a divine name, Gaia
(Γαῖα), or simply Ge (Γῆ) in less poetical form in Greek and
Tellus or Terra in Latin, but we do not use these names except as
adjectives: telluric, terrestrial, terran.... Instead, we use for our
planet what we also call the regolith and the soil of the land sur-
face. So far, Cookie.
When we started calling our planet “earth,” we did not know
that it was a planet in a solar system, let alone that it had also sib- be similar. But “the earth” is not the equal of the others: it is
lings. It was simply where we lived, later tilled it and grew our
food in it and in places used it to make our dwellings. Something
similar happened with the Sun and the Moon. The word Sun sim-
ply comes from the Indo-European root “to shine.” It was what
shone to us and thereby enlightening and warming us. So we
gave it a descriptive name. The name Moon has also an Indo-
European root that it shares with meter (not metre; American
English unfortunately confuses the unit, i.e., metre with the tool,
i.e., meter), i.e., “measurer,” because our ancestors used its phases
to measure time. So our satellite also has a descriptive name, not
a divine one. Both the Sun (the enlightener) and the Moon (the
measurer) also have divine names: Helios ( Ἣ λιος) in Greek,
Helius in Latin for the Sun and Selene (Σελήνη) in Greek and
Luna in Latin for the Moon.
www.geosociety.org/gsatoday
Recently it has become fashion to write and speak of “Earth”
without a definite article and to capitalise it. Using Earth as a
planet name in the Solar System violates the time-honoured rules
of how we name its planets. In addition, this new fashion has cre-
ated the necessity of explaining what we are referring to. A plant
may grow in the earth or on Earth. This context is not too unclear
(but think of exclaiming “where on earth is this plant?”). The
meaning is not so clear if we say we walked on the sacred earth or
on Sacred Earth. What if Sacred Earth is the proper name of a
sacred place and does not refer to our planet? Or just remember
the famous phrase, often attributed to the English poet W.H.
Auden, but actually first formulated by the British comedian John
Foster Hall: “We are all here on earth to help others; what on earth
the others are here for, I don’t know.” Which earth would you cap-
italise in this quote? Thus, in many instances, the whole e versus
E distinction and the employment or non-employment of a defi-
nite article become useless to distinguish different concepts.
If we are so keen to have the name of our home planet capital-
ised and get rid of the definite article in front of it, we should sim-
ply call it Gaia. We have already done so when we named our sci-
ence geology, Gaia + logos, and its parent science geography,
Gaia + graphein. I personally never use earth without a definite
article and never capitalise it in my publications. I respect the his-
torical roots of our usage. But if people are unhappy about it, let
us switch to Gaia.
However, there is a much weightier reason that we should con-
tinue calling our planet “the earth” and not “Earth”: it is our
abode, not any old planet in the Solar System. If we called our
planet Gaia, it would be just one of the eight siblings named
according to a certain rule, i.e., giving it a divine name, which is
fine. It would be one among equals. If we called it Earth, it would
where humanity arose to question its origins, its place and its
meaning. The rise of humanity is dependent on the planet, its
peculiar distance from the Sun, its ability to harbour water and
develop soil, i.e., “earth” that feeds us and makes our life and
thought possible. When we say and write “the earth” we mean
both the planet and signify that it is our home.
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