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Comment by jerf | Hacker News Reader

When my kids were young, I accidentally flubbed the pronunciation of "Santa Claus" once and said something that sounded a lot like "Centiclops", which I decided to roll with. Centiclops is a lot like a cyclops with one eye, except the as a reading of the roots clearly indicates, this is a creature with 100 eyes.

Today I learn that Centiclops effectively has a Unicode character. As Centiclops' representative in the world of the non-imaginary, we accept that a Unicode character with a hundred eyes is not practical and we accept the representation with just a few eyes, but generally agree that upgrading to 7 to 10 is a nice improvement, as 7 does not evenly divide into 100 but 10 does. This is important, because... reasons.

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From "The House of Asterion" by Jorge Luis Borges:

"It is true that I never leave my house, but it is also true that its doors (whose numbers are infinite) (footnote: The original says fourteen, but there is ample reason to infer that, as used by Asterion, this numeral stands for infinite.) are open day and night to men and to animals as well."

https://klasrum.weebly.com/uploads/9/0/9/1/9091667/the_house...

That reminds me of the Nahuatl word centzon, which is used to mean either 400, or an innumerable/infinite number. The Aztecs used a base-20 number system, so 400 = 20*20.

https://www.mythicalcreaturescatalogue.com/post/2016/06/10/t...

Greek mythology actually did have a "centiclops" -- Argus Panoptes ("all eyes"), who had a hundred eyes all over his body. Hera assigned him to watch over Io, a nymph who had been turned into a cow, so that Zeus wouldn't come and shag her in secret. Argus was slain by Hermes (a Zeus loyalist); to mourn and honor him, Hera had his eyes transferred to the peacock's tail.

The real Greek for a hundred-eyed being would be something like "hekatonoptes", but Argus wasn't called that as far as I know.

There should be a combining “eye” character so that you can have as many or few eyes as you like.

Though to be honest, that Unicode character looks more like a bunch of cells forming a tissue to me than eyes.

But then what are eyes but a bunch of cells?

B ¬∈ A

The nice thing about ꙮ having ten eyes is that you can now combine ten of them with U+200D ZERO WIDTH JOINER [1] to make a centiclops grapheme, as long as your font has a glyph for that particular ligature. (Readers without centiclops-compatible fonts will simply see ten separate ꙮ glyphs, an acceptable fallback for legacy systems.)

[1]: https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Zero-width_joiner

Or perhaps this character is an accurate representation of a Dekaclops.

My client finds your proposal offensive and an appropriation of his culture, and also that Dekaclops guy is mean and smells bad and hasn't returned the lawnmower my client lent him even though my client has clearly referred to the need to mow his lawn several times now so he totally doesn't deserve a Unicode character.

It'd be dekaops, because the -cl- is part of “cycle”+“ops” (one round eye, with the one dropped because it's inferred). So “cycle” out, “deka” in.

I thought ops was from opsis and referred to a “circle-like face”?

Like oinops, referring to the “wine-like face” (ie dark read) of a sea passage in the evening.

May be wrong, though, I don’t have my tools handy to check now.

“Santa Clause” would translate to “holy clause”. There might be such a thing but I think you meant Santa Claus :)

Maybe just a big fan of the Tim Allen movie?

[grunts]

My fingers love adding the e's on the end of any worde that can conceivably take them. Also have that problem with any word that can take an "ly" even if I don't meanly it.

Fixed, thanks.

That's supercalifragilisticexpialidociously strangee.

I thought "santa" meant "saint"?

It does; the character originates from Saint Nicholas (or Odin, depending who you ask)

“Santa” means “female saint” in Italian and Spanish. Perhaps the English “santa” came from another language but I always found the name “Santa Claus” just horrible.

The name Santa Claus evolved from Nick's Dutch nickname, Sinter Klaas, a shortened form of Sint Nikolaas (Dutch for Saint Nicholas)

https://www.history.com/.amp/topics/christmas/santa-claus#si...

It’s actually Sinterklaas (without a space) and we still call him that :) We also ended up re-importing the American Santa Claus, so these days we have two festive holidays in December.

The first mention of this version of Saint Nicholas's name has the form "St. A Claus" and appeared in the New-York Gazette of 20 Dec 1773.[1] The same issue also first reported some incident regarding tea in Boston harbour. Nice coincidence.

[1] Source: https://boston1775.blogspot.com/2016/12/st-claus-was-celebra...

The Tim Allen movie series in Spanish is titled "Santa Cláusula".

> I thought "santa" meant "saint"?

Well, santa is a Spanish word meaning "holy" and saint is a cognate French word meaning the same thing. They descend from Latin sanctus; compare sanctify.

When the prayer goes "holy Mary, mother of god", "holy Mary" is an exact equivalent of "santa María".

Might as well mention “Sancta Marīa” in Latin, for example from the Christian Hail Mary[1], a recorded Latin version[2], written Latin next to English and Spanish[3] and of course translated into thousands of languages[4] although unfortunately mostly written using /A-Z/i; I am an atheist interested in languages.

[1] https://en.m.wikipedia.org/wiki/Hail_Mary

[2] https://glaemscrafu.jrrvf.com/english/avemaria.html

[3] https://hymnary.org/text/hail_mary_full_of_grace_the_lord_is...

[4] http://www.marysrosaries.com/Rosary_prayers_in_different_lan...

In my mind, the Latin form of Mary is Mariam, because that's what my Latin teacher taught me. (He also commented that, unlike Greek names, Hebrew names never inflected in Latin, so that it would be "Mariam" regardless of what case the name should appear in.)

But it makes sense that Church Latin would be different.

I thought it was a misspelling of Satan, but maybe that's because I'm Jewish.

Saint is more or less the same as holy, just used as a title. It comes from Old French saint, seinte "holy, pious, devout," from Latin sanctus "holy, consecrated"

> Centiclops is a lot like a cyclops with one eye, except th[at] as a reading of the roots clearly indicates, this is a creature with 100 eyes.

Not in any normal sense of "roots". Cent is a Latin root meaning 100. ops is a Greek form meaning eye. The -i- indicates that the word is being formed in Latin, and the -cl- is entirely spurious. The original Greek word divides as cycl-ops, not cy-clops.

In any case, there is already an ancient, general, and perfectly serviceable epithet Panoptes.

A bit like the heli-copter | helico-pter thing.

Wow. I never noticed that before. Spiral wings.

Cent is easy to grasp if you speak a Romance.

But it doesn't combine with ops. You'd need to talk about a hecatops or a hecatontops. And even more than it can't combine with ops, it can't combine with clops because there is no such root.

It does. Combining Latin and Greek roots is done fairly frequently.

https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Hybrid_word mentions automobile, chloroform, hexadecimal, micro-instruction, petroleum, television and a few others.

Citing wikipedia (“wiki” is a Hawaiian-derived root, and “-pedia” a Greek-derived suffix) is particularly appropriate here.

The thing that will annoy you most of all is that I was fully aware of all of this at the time... and I did it anyways.

Truly the purity of English will never recover from the trauma that I have inflicted on it.

> But it doesn't combine with ops.

Sure, it does, in English, which stole prefixes, suffixes, and roots from Latin, Greek, and many other languages, and has no problem using them together, without special concern about where it got them from.

Impressively polylingual, even multiglot.

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