The subtitle (“Prosecutors are from Neptune, defense attorneys are from Pluto”) for Rod Smolla’s interesting Slate piece on prosecutors and defense lawyers reminded me of something I noted in 2003: Women, it is said, are from Venus, and men are from Mars — but many men (including me) just aren’t very martial.
Maybe we’re from other planets. The mercurial are from Mercury. The jovial from Jupiter (that’s where I’m from). The saturnine from Saturn. Sailors are from Neptune — there’s actually a very old and now obsolete term, “Neptunist,” which referred to “[a] nautical person.” The solitary (OK, the root is wrong here, but work with me here) are from the Sun. Loonies are from the Moon (obviously). And the really far-out and eccentric are from Pluto.
What’s more — and I am not making this up — homosexuals are apparently from Uranus. From my New Shorter Oxford: “Uranian . . . . B n. A homosexual. Now arch. or literary.” This is attested to the early 20th century, with “uranism” for “homosexuality” dating to the late 19th; I have seen it credited to Karl Heinrich Ulrichs, a German lawyer and early gay — er, Uranian — rights activist. The etymology apparently goes back to Plato, but philosophy makes my head hurt, so I’ll leave it at that. Ceres, Halley’s Comet, and Quaoar are still up for grabs.
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