über, duper;
hyper, super!
Astronomy has always reveled in superlatives; what with supernovae, hypernovae, ultraluminous this and thats and other Extremes of Nature.
I have reason to believe that, despite the best efforts of our few classically educated faculty, we are about to run out of descriptors!
This crisis of nomenclature is fast approaching, and we need to start planning now.
What other prepends of overenthusiasm can we use to pitch our favourite outliers?
Extra bonus points for pure neologisms.
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The very cynical portion of my brain notes that it's almost certainly easier to persuade faculty to inaction than action.…
I suggest obnoxious internet-speak.
For example:
OMGnova
WTFluminous
and so on...
I like it;
l33t!
Rescale everything with an extra modifier.
You have:
super, ultra, hyper
Then add "-irific" to get the next three:
superific, ultrarific, hyperrific
If needed (progress an be fast), just use a second modifier "-icious" for the next ones:
supericious, ultraicious, hypericious
And then combine for the next three in turn:
superificious, ultrarificious, hyperrificious
You can pile on with "-istic", "-wammo" and "-ludicrious" as well as needed, in combination. The resulting tree of terms should last you up until the end of the decade at least.
Too much in-the-box thinking. Instead, you should exploit the contrast effect of a sudden change in direction: go from ever grander to small and cute. Who could resist a "lill'nova"?
I keep trying to get the theoretical computer science community to adopt the complexity classes "WTF-hard" and "OMG-complete", but so far I've had little success.
Also, we need to bring back the HSK, or "Horrendous Space Kablooie".
the husband, a computer geek, suggests prefixes such as giga and tera, e.g. giganova. then one can combine prefixes to come up with gigaultranova.
the two year old suggests yippie and gippie. ginormous is already in popular usage. the five year old says gordangerous.
i suggest tall, grande, and venti. okay, not so original. maybe i'll have to head out to the local large chain overpriced coffee shop to think about it some more.
Keep 'em coming. I see several ways to challenge the ApJ style guide, which is opportune if they are about to leave the University of Chicago Press!
Hm, corportate sponsorship opportunities.
I suppose if we must sell out, then "Starbucks" is definitely the way to go.
We also need terms for things that don't live up to their press releases - e.g. nadanova for an exploding star that fizzles out.
Shortly we will discover Black Holes so ultra-massive that they truly swallow everything in sight. These could be BIG GULP Black Holes.
Amongst my friends within the Phsyics Department we have developed and "ass-scale." It started by one research adviser saying he did not want my friend to half-ass his poster at an upcoming meeting. This immediately after led to us developing the term "full-assed", which is of course two half-asses. One could do greater then full-assed and
you can modify the "ass" and use it as a unit measurement akin to percentages.
This can of course be moved to any coordinate system. If for instance one works on something where polar coordinates is used the "ass" becomes a measure in units of pi(2Ï-assed is one complete revolution)
This is an easy system to use and becomes a useful descriptor for more than research related tasks.
Steinn: Novas in tall, grande, and venti sizes? ;)
I'll have a hyperifistinova, hold the barium. ;-)
Humongous. Humongosity.
"This nova bigger than that nova but no as big as them novas" (with apologies to Terry Pratchett).
Embig, embeiggify, embiggened, embigginated; to embig. Embigginized.
Disembiggen.
Embig upward.
Embig downward.
Dwarf embiggen.