The NomCom was formed in 1973, with Ray Binns (chair), Roy Clarke,
Glenn Huss, E. L. Krinov, and Robert Hutchison as charter
members. These two spellings, Wolf Creek and Okechobee, were in use
long before that.
Basically, the Society decided to adopt the Catalogue of Meteorites,
which in the mid 20th century was the Hey catalogue, as the official
list of meteorite names. The formal decision to do this coincided
with the formation of the NomCom. Before that, there was no such
thing as an "official" meteorite name, although many people accepted
the Catalogue's recommendations.
You can read some of the early rumblings that led to the creation of
the NomCom in
http://articles.adsabs.harvard.edu/cgi-bin/nph-iarticle_query?1971Metic...6...21H
and
http://articles.adsabs.harvard.edu/cgi-bin/nph-iarticle_query?1972Metic...7...17B.
As to Kevin Forbe's question about how corrections are made: they are
not. Once a name gets into the literature and catalogs, the general
philosophy is that it is better to leave it alone than to start
changing it. The only exceptions to this have been when typos were
caught soon after publication of the Bulletin and nobody had
published anything yet.
Jeff
At 03:24 PM 3/10/2006, David Weir wrote:
Frank,
I believe you missed the point of my post. I don't place any blame
with the NomCom for an incorrect spelling for Lake Okeechobee
recorded back in 1916, before the MetSoc NomCom even existed (1933),
it's that I don't suspect there were all that many names to type
into whatever official record existed in 1916, and being the first
meteorite to be recorded from Florida, I'm just curious how
something of such apparent importance got screwed up... back then. I
am wondering about the wheels of the system of that time, and how
this spelling error was allowed to propagate instead of being caught
and corrected - by a secretary or somebody - before it became the
"official" record. Certainly a number of people had to approve of
this name along its way to officialdom, likely some from Okeechobee
too. Heck, I may even have erors in spelling in this post, but then
this is not going to be a historic record of any significance like
the name of the first meteorite to be found in the state of Florida.
At what point did the name Okechobee cross the continuum and become
uncorrectable? It's a matter for history and those of us who have an
issue with the misspelling of the name of one of only four
meteorites known from our home state. Anyway, this was my point, but
thanks for defending the MetSoc reputation about my post.
David
DavidFrank Prochaska wrote:
Frankly, with the thousands of "official" meteorites from hundreds
of states and countries in which scores of languages are spoken which are
written in a number of alphabets and syllabaries (sp? - looking for the word
for methods of writing like kanji, not really an alphabet), let alone issues
like ancient American Indian place names in locations where the primary
language is English, it's a wonder little errors like this are not much more
common. I think the NomCom does a wonderful job, given their scope,
resources, and circumstances.
Frank Prochaska
Subject: Re: [meteorite-list] Wolf Creek total mass
Herbert Raab wrote:
Bob WALKER writes:
Defintely WOLFE Creek with an e
At least the Western Australian government and a map says so...
they can't all be wrong can they hmmm
They can be wrong. The place may well be named Wolfe Creek (with "e"),
but the meteorite is oficially named Wolf Creek (without "e").
Wolfe Creek is not even registered as a synonym.
I guess that's a bit like the official NomCom misspelling of the
Lake "Okeechobee", FL meteorite, the meteorite incorrectly spelled
Okechobee, and no synonyms listed either. It makes you wonder how
such a thing occurred.
David
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