Comment on Annotations for *Star Trek: Starfleet Academy* 1x03: “Vitus Reflux”
harrys_balzac@lemmy.dbzer0.com 3 days ago
Latin was my major - vita is life. Vitus doesn’t exist in Latin. I think they just made up a Latin-sounding word and ran with it.
buerviper@lemmy.world 3 days ago
Vitus was a saint, and apparently, in Slavic folklore patron of mushrooms
harrys_balzac@lemmy.dbzer0.com 3 days ago
That makes way more sense.
buerviper@lemmy.world 2 days ago
not sure if it makes more sense, but it is at least one way how they got it. Even though I just find German info on the topic, and no English source … and no idea how reflux fits in. Vitus Dance was a medieval interpretation of epilepsy and related illnesses. Reflux means “backflow”. Maybe it refers to how the fungus talks back?
But I found that the name Vitus may derive from the word vita, and has been interpreted as “the living one”.
haverholm@kbin.earth 2 days ago
Yeah, Vitus is the masculine form of vita. It just isn't a Latin word but a name formed from one. There are similar examples of modern names derived in the same way, which ancient Romans wouldn't recognise as words, but might well interpret as descriptive adjective names.
wirehead@lemmy.world 2 days ago
My headcanon suggests that they were either running out of words on the cladistics tree and went to Slavic languages because all of the Latin had been taken … or a space Slav decided to honor their roots.