Asteroid is such a neat word.

It just feels so sciency. It radiates a faint but steady pulse of wonderment.

Asteroid. I think it’s helped along by the fact that people don’t typically use it as an adjective. It keeps the usage of the word low, despite its ubiquitous existence in the English language. Everyone can picture in their mind their version of what an asteroid looks like.

But no one really uses it as an adjective.

What safeguards this word from being carelessly tossed into metaphors? What sunny disposition do we have towards it? So many other astronomical nouns are moonlighting as ways to describe other things. It’s universal truth on a galactic scale. Some black hole of logic, a cosmic joke. How did asteroid eclipse other words to become the star of the show?

What sort of things can be called.. astroidal? Outside of science fiction, where astroidal armor protects the story from plot-holes, or geometry, where mathematicians try to convince us that the individual planes of an astroidal ellipsoid take the shape of stars (which comes from the Greek word astron, meaning star). Ancient astronomers were pretty sloppy with their drawings. Well, except for the Dippers. Those things look like dippers. But I think I’ve made my point.

Language has its own universe of celestial bodies: some orbit us daily, their use becoming repetitive but reliable (when the goal of communication needs to be utterly clear), while others light up poetry and wax poetic. Still, some drift far away, waiting for someone brave enough to pull them into metaphor.