Quote:
Originally Posted by jason taylor
"Big" might work but there is nothing in space that is particularly big, or high or otherwise has an obvious relation with anything else. Even "gas giants" may dwarf planets but aren't big compared to space.By contrast Mississippi, Superior, etc reference something obviously really big (and in Superiors case higher than some things).
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Except that isn't how most things actually got named. You name things when bunches of people need a way to talk about them and distinguish them from other thing. Stuff that isn't gets a map coordinate, or a catalog number that points to a map coordinate.
The Big River doesn't need to be especially big, it just needs to be bigger than the Muddy River, the Ugly Fish River and Zack's Cabin Stream the locals who originally called it than needed to distinguish it from. The fact that there are 300 bigger rivers on the planet didn't matter - they weren't settled near them and didn't need to talk about them. Yeah OK Zack's Cabin Stream is actually the headwaters of the biggest river system on the planet, but right where we were when we named it, it's much tinier than the Big River that flows 40 miles into Funny Shaped Lake.