Western Wedding Dresses

As we finish up the month of June, the traditional month of marriages, which dates back to Roman times when they celebrated the festival of the deity Jupiter and his wife Juno, who was the goddess of marriage and childbirth. In Victorian times, the tradition is thought to have continued because there were flowers available for wedding décor, and the scent of the flowers masked body odor.

The common form of white dresses for those in the west began during the 1800s, especially when Queen Victoria married Prince Albert in 1840. Before that any color would do, based on wealth or personal preference. The white dress practice spread quickly to the broad reaches of the British Empire. Back then, no woman, not even royalty was expected to wear her wedding dress only once and then never again. This practice also changed after the marriage of Queen Victoria.

After that, wedding dresses were adapted to the styles of the day, such as during the early 1900s, they included lace or frills. During the 1920s, they were typically short in the front with a longer train in the back and were worn with cloche-style wedding veils. Following current fashions continued until the late 1960s, when it became popular to go back to long, full-skirted designs reminiscent of the Victorian era. These days the majority of wedding dresses are strapless dresses or sleeveless.

White wedding dresses had been used for many years before that, but it was not the dominant color. Also, white dresses did not have a symbolic meaning of virginity or purity, but rather were costlier and harder to keep clean, and thus were status symbols of wealth for the wearer. Victorian ideals of weddings, romantic love, and purity were projected backwards to rewrite the white dress as a symbol of innocence and virginity rather than wealth.

Many other cultures also have specific, although usually unwritten rules for wedding attire, including color and style.

Pluto and the Naming of the Planets

With all the publicity surrounding the recent photos of Pluto, Seems fitting to look at it and the other (real) planets and how they received their names. Pluto is the largest and second-most-massive known dwarf planet in the Solar System and the ninth-largest and tenth-most-massive known object directly orbiting the Sun.

It had been discovered many times by astronomers, who did not realize what they found. It was discovered 'for real' in 1930 by Clyde Tombaugh, and was originally considered the ninth planet from the Sun. After 1992, its status as a planet fell into question following the discovery of several objects of similar size, in particular Eris, which is 27% more massive than Pluto. This led the International Astronomical Union to define the term planet formally for the first time. This definition excluded Pluto and reclassified it as a member of the new "dwarf planet" category. The other dwarf planets are Ceres, Eris, Haumea, and Makemake (sic).

The tradition of naming planets after mythological gods was passed continued after Roman names for the five extraterrestrial planets they were aware of.

• Earth is the only planet not named for a mythological god.
• Venus is named after the goddess of love. It is thought this planet got its name from the fact that it is “pretty” to look at as the third most bright object in our solar system in the sky as viewed from Earth (after the Sun and the Moon).
  
• Mercury is named after the god of thievery, tradesmen or commerce, and travel. It is thought that the planet probably was named such due to how quickly, relatively speaking, it travels across the sky.
• Pluto, although no longer a "real" planet is named after the god of the underworld. The name was proposed by Venetia Burney, a then eleven-year-old schoolgirl in Oxford, England, who was interested in classical mythology.
• Saturn is named after the Roman god of agriculture. It followed the Greek designation for Cronus. In modern Greek, the planet retains its ancient name Cronus—Κρόνος: Kronos.
  
• Neptune was named after the god of the sea. It got its name thanks to the fact that it has a blue color.
  
• Uranus is named after the very early god of the sky (and father to the Titans).
• Mars was named after the Roman god of war. It’s thought that it was labeled such based on the reddish hue of the planet, relating to blood.
• Jupiter is named after the god of thunder and the sky, and king of the gods. It is probable that it was named such as it is the largest non-star in our solar system.

Incidentally, many languages have their own name for Earth, such as ‘terra’ in Portuguese, ‘dünya’ in Turkish and ‘aarde’ in Dutch. However, the common thread in all languages is that they were all derived from the same meaning, which is ‘ ground’ or ‘soil’. The modern English word and name for our planet Earth likely extends back more than 1,000 years. The name was also found in early English translations from the bible.