Eggcorn Forum

Fox News has an article (here ) about a picture taken by the Webb telescope of the planet Uranus (him of the many puns, besides the buns you recently mentioned, Peter.) It contains the following sentence:

What makes Uranus unique is that it rotates on its side, or as NASA said, roughly 90-degress from its plane of orbit.

“Degress” is probably just a switched-doublet typo, but given egress and regress (not to mention the lack of progress in congress ; but I digress ) one might get the idea that the planet degresses from its expected upright position so much as to lie flat. That is in fact not a bad description, at least as I understand things.
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So it makes eggcornish sense, but I doubt the perps had it in mind.
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fwiw, the description “roughly 90 degrees from its plane of orbit” is wrong, or confusing at best. They mean, apparently, “roughly 90 degrees from the expected upright position relative to the plane of orbit”, i.e. “with its axis roughly flat along (parallel to) its plane of orbit.” Or, perhaps, “with its rotational motion at noon/midnight roughly 90 degrees from its plane of orbit.” (At sunrise/sunset it would be parallel to the plane of orbit and parallel to or up to 90 degrees from its orbital motion, depending on where it is in its orbit. If I’m picturing this right. It gets complicated!.) I did not find what stars Uranus’ axis points to: two opposite constellations in the Zodiac, I expect. (All the planets except Pluto have more-or-less the same plane of orbit, the famous “Ecliptic”, so they all look along that plane at the constellations of the Zodiac.)

Last edited by DavidTuggy (2023-04-15 14:40:54)