nōmen optāre nunc nequeō

An alternative name is '''Toliman''', whose etymology may be Arabic (''Al-Thalimain'' meaning "Ostriches"), or [[Hebrew language|Hebrew]] (meaning "The Heretofore and the Hereafter" and/or "Shoot of the Vine"). (See [[Centaurus]]. Also, the Japanese edition of this article.)

I probably ran across this sentence sometime in the late 2000s; I found the glosses offered terribly evocative, but no source was provided for them, and they were eventually deleted. Though despite someone asking for a source as soon as six weeks later, it took a decade for the sentence to actually come out. I suspected at the time they were spurious, because the only etymology I could confirm for Toliman was the Arabic one: aẓ-Ẓalīmān, "The Ostriches" (an asterism of which a Cen is the major star). And indeed that is the source of the name; but people rarely make up facts out of thin air for fun, they're usually mangling or misreading another source, and I became determined to track down the origin of this claim.

A while back I tracked "the heretofore and hereafter" ultimately to Frances Rolleston, an English woman who wrote Mazzaroth; or, The Constellations in 1862, which claimed the stars and constellations were a kind of witness to the Gospels, and used an elaborate explication of their names and the associated imagery to read Biblical motifs and images into them. It's a pretty interesting text, taking what is a sort of medieval approach to the natural world, the same one that viewed all kinds of processes of nature as symbolically reflecting religious concepts. It also exhibited the Victorian flair for trying to unify the origins of myths and ideas across cultures, essentially seeming to detect fragments of ancient but half-remembered Christian prophecy in mythologies from all across the world. Mazzaroth was used by E.W. Bullinger as a source for The Witness of the Stars (1893), which in turn got used in a lot of Christian homeschooling curricula by evangelicals in the US in the 20th century, which is probably where the Wikipedia editor remembered this tidbit from. Rolleston cites Ulugh Beg's Zij-i-Sultani and authorities on the Hebrew language, but of course this gloss isn't in the Zij-i-Sultani (which is just a list of star positions; I tracked down a Latin translation via the Staatsbibliothek's digital collection to be sure), and I could never find where Rolleston actually got it, or where the "shoot of the vine" gloss came from.

(Rolleston herself is a kinda fascinating figure, an autodidact with a passion for the Bible, astronomy, and ancient languages; Bullinger, who knew her personally, took Mazzaroth and simplified and narrativized Rolleston's notes and correspondences, creating a grand overarching narrative presented as simple fact, linked to eschatology, which explains his appeal to modern evangelicals against Rolleston's more low-key scholarly tone.)

Rolleston's method was to try to match Hebrew consonantal roots to the Arabic-derived namesm which she takes as reflecting an original Hebrew: she therefore links "Toliman" to 'olam, "the world, eternity." Based on its use in Deuteronomy 32:7 and Psalms 10:16, Rolleston gets the gloss "the heretofore and the hereafter". She makes other errors--attributing variability to A Cen that it doesn't have--and tries to link that to her gloss of the name. Bullinger goes on to link Rolleston's gloss to Revelation 1:8 ("I am the Alpha and the Omega, says the Lord God, who is and who was and who is to come, the Almighty"), which gets repeated by later sources in the gospel-in-the-stars literature.

"Shoot of the vine" has continued to bug me; but going back over Mazzaroth, I think I get where it came from: Rolleston assigns Centaurus as the second "decan" of Virgo (really a paranatellonta, a constellation that rises at the same time as a Zodiacal sign); the first decan, immediately preceding, is Coma ("the Branch or Infant near or held by the Woman") containing Spica (Al Zimach), glossed by Rolleston as Hebrew tsemech, "the branch"; eta Virginis/Vindemiatrix, glossed as "Chald., Vindemiatrix, the son, who cometh, or the branch" (really Latin for "grape-gatherer") and "Gr., Prometheus, the deliverer, who cometh, or the branch (Arab.) who cometh"; and Virgo itself is described as "the woman bearing the branch." The association here seems to be with Jesus as the "shoot of the tree of Jesse". So "shoot of the vine" seems to me to be a conflation of this other material, perhaps along with someone's attempt to rationalize it with the Latin etymology.

Bullinger and other sources based on Rolleston get quoted by astrology sites (and Mazzaroth has been popular with mystics; the Order of the Golden Dawn apparently kept a copy), so it's easy to imagine a careless copy-paste moving a gloss to the wrong place; it doesn't seem to show up in any easily-available pre-internet source, and I still can't find a specific origin for that exact phrase, as assigned to a Cen, that isn't Wikipedia circa 2007. So if you or anyone you know was editing Wikipedia under the handle "mmori" in November 2006, please contact me; I would love to know where you originally ran across those etymologies, just so I could finally scratch this itch that's been bugging me for two decades.

"Ambiguously brown" - frankly that's just lazy, that could be anywhere. Just say "brown" if you really have to.

"Ambiguously African" - okay you have a vague guess of a continent

"Ambiguously Central Asian" - plausible to narrow down on sight if you're very familiar with people from around this region

"Ambiguously Baltic" - this mf is either Latvian or Lithuanian, and I am intrigued by the fact that your estimate is this precise but you still aren't confident enough in your assessment to guess which one

reader: "so wait, was he white? black? hispanic? Samoan?"

The False Positive Problem No monitoring system is perfect, and that's the part making a lot of people nervous. Fatigue detection sounds simple in theory until real-world driving enters the picture. Drivers glance away from the road constantly. They check mirrors, navigation systems, gauges, blind spots, and surrounding traffic. Some people naturally appear tired late at night even when fully alert. That creates obvious concerns about false positives. A system interpreting normal behavior as impairment could potentially interfere with someone trying to get home safely. Here's the part that matters. Once the vehicle has authority to intervene, even small mistakes by the software become a much bigger problem. Drivers are used to mechanical failures. They are not used to arguing with their own car about whether they are capable of driving it. And that's where things get complicated. The Bigger Issue Sitting in the Background The monitoring itself is only part of the concern. The data collection may end up becoming the bigger fight. These systems rely on continuous observation, which means they generate information about driver behavior over time. That can include attention patterns, distraction events, and how the system interprets the person behind the wheel. Drivers immediately started asking the obvious question: where does all of that information go? Right now, there is no single clear answer covering every manufacturer or system. Concerns are already growing around whether that data could eventually be shared with insurance companies, automakers, or law enforcement agencies. For privacy-conscious drivers, this starts looking less like a safety feature and more like a permanent behavioral tracking system built into every new vehicle. That shift changes the conversation completely.

People like comparing Greek εὐάζω, e.g. De Vaan:

Which suggests that the underlying noise is of PIE age (not impossible; English woe as an exclamation is another one that's that old) or at least older than Proto-Italic, but the formation of the verbs is later: εὐάζω has the innovated Greek -άζω verb-forming suffix, while Latin ovāre just shoved it (that is, an exclamation like *ova) into the first conjugation bare. The choice of conjugation seems to be semantically meaningless here and determined by the final vowel in the exclamation, and that also has precedent in Latin: the greeting ave, which is a borrowing from Phoenician and also basically an opaque noise to a speaker of Latin (Cicero notwithstanding), got derived into avēre 'to say ave', in the second conjugation.