I thought that the bone being picked with 'Terra' was that no one was particularly fond of it either in sci-fi or out of it.
You made an appeal to plausibility which isn't a priority for loads of sci-fi. And plenty of folks are fond of it, hence why it's commonly used.
Plenty of people also have dysentery, but I wouldn't say they're fond of it. To me calling the Earth Terra isn't some sort of cardinal sci-fi sin, but it's definitely coming into it's own as a cliche. It grates on me personally if only because it's completely unnecessary and a little pretentious to use Terra, Sol, and Luna, when Earth, Sun, and Moon work just as well and are far more easily understood.
Okay, my cousin elects to use a wheelchair rather than stay in bed all day, but he's never really happy about it.
Authors have significantly more options than your wheelchair-bound cousin does, yet many still elect to use Terra/Terran. Another bad comparison. But if it's that important for you to believe that nearly everyone is dissatisfied with the word, then by all means, keep believing it.
That's not my point. You're saying that people like it because they use it. And why do they use it? Because they like it. It's circular reasoning.
I'm saying that people using the word is evidence that they like it. Similar to how someone who frequently dines at a particular restaurant is evidence that they like the food there. They eat there because they like it. And we know they like it because they continually eat there. Where is the flaw in that logic?
Which again is circular reasoning. Maybe they eat there because it's the only restaurant they can afford, or their friend owns the restaurant and they're trying to do them a solid. I frequently go to a coffee shop with terrible coffee just so I can flirt with one of the waitresses.
It's not circular reasoning, it's how human behavior works. Are you at all familiar with behavioral science? We do things to produce the consequences that we want. Whatever your reasoning for going to your coffee shop of choice, by definition you prefer its experience over the other coffee shops.
No, it's pretty much the standard definition of circular reasoning. X is true because of Y and Y is true because of X. X being that they like it, and Y being that they use it. Human behavior has nothing to do with whether this reasoning is circular or not.
I take it you don't subscribe to B.F. Skinner's behaviorist theory that behaviors that are reinforced will tend to continue, while behaviors that are punished will eventually end?
Yes, the Skinner box and all that, but that only works when people there's a perceived correlation between an action and a consequence. And this still doesn't mean that you've based your argument on a logical fallacy.
I've based my position in behavioral science, but I don't mind you believing I've committed a logical fallacy. Because both of our conversations proved unproductive I'm going to make an effort to not interact with you in future. Ironically, that follows Skinner's theory.
The next forum I join, I'm stealing "hungverung" for my username. Just thought you should know. Also, so this isn't off-topic, I'm going to make "Hungverung" be the alien name for Terra the first time I get around to writing that sort of story. And if I ever get a cat again....
But would Hungverung be populated by a race that would then be referred to as "the Hung?" ... Form an orderly line, ladies.
Nope, you don't understand the grammar correctly, you need to add the medial vowel to make it a sub-adjective in the present (as opposed to absent) tense. Hence the hungover Hungover male looked green for a moment, then puked.
I think this is entirely arbitrary. I’d want to use whatever word I thought would be closer to what my characters would say. Science minded people might use Latin, regular people say “earth” and if you’re not actually there they’d likely just call it “home.” If you look at transcripts from the Apollo missions, they called it home just as often as they called it Earth.
This all feels rather like a game of "I'm not touching you" in the back seat of a 70's station wagon. Pointless and annoying. Heaven forfend mom pulls the car over to the shoulder. I loathe the word chronicles. It's an ugly word composed of profoundly unpretty phonemes that invoke an image of gross-ass hammer toes. "Dude, I have to go to the podiatrist. My chronicles are killing me." "No, no. Leave those shoes on, bro. Don't nobody wanna' see that shit." It's also a word that's not going away because - my opinion notwithstanding - that's the word that we came up with to describe a certain kind of chain of stories. Thus ends the Chronicles of How the Universe is Unconcerned with the Opinions of Wreybies.
I'm not "tired" per se. I kinda tend to use different terms, mainly just say "Earth", in a lot of the stuff I write but mainly that's because it just goes with my style i guess. One thing I did try, and frankly I think it works, is the term Super Earth which refers to a future, hyper-advanced version of Earth which has been literally altered by future humanity--it ("she" in their parlance) is covered in shells, each larger than the other before it like a matryoshka doll, like a Dyson sphere around a planet. But even then, they use the term "Terra Mater", or some in the setting do, as for them Earth herself holds religious importance.
Yes! I don't want to sound like I ripped off anything, but I have read the Culture series repeatedly, it was an influence on a lot of what I write. That and Lensmen. It's slightly different in that Super Earth/Terra Mater is like a "one of a kind" thing. It's not a "type" of world it's this like Great Wall of China situation.
