transformercator

Once upon a time a systems consultant was on a software contract.

The product was a data mapping system named Mercator. The purpose of this post is to relate that last sentence to my coined word ‘transformercator’.

The creator of the core product algorithm was very protective about her product. Deservedly so – Mercator is a strong name.

Gerardus Mercator lived in the 16th century. Actually his name was Cremere, not Mercator. Maybe he changed it to Mercator because the Church had a warrant for his arrest. Perhaps he was exercising his logic too much.

Lucky for many, especially for those of us in the western hemisphere, the holy detectives did not get their man.

Mercator had a lot to do with how we look at the world when we look at the world in a practical way. Like getting across an ocean to discover the new world, or getting away from the old one, or in our current era just getting back home after having done our duties to see the old world through modernized eyes.

Of course, when we are seated in something whose seat back is relaxing in other than its full upright position at something like five miles high and we glance out the window we might fail to notice those north south lines called longitudes or those east west lines called latitudes that are so neatly drawn on the world beneath us.

We may still be unaware of all those lines after we free the auto from its long incarceration at the airport parking lot. You might not even turn on the GPS system in your car. Heck, you know your way around now. You don’t need a GPS to get you home. If you did, though, the GPS would be thanking its lucky stars, I mean satellites, that the holy order did not catch up with Gerardus Mercator. The GPS is as dependent on that net of lines drawn all over the globe as was the guidance system in the plane you were on.

And by now you have guessed that a reason existed for the data mapping software being named Mercator. And you have probably already guessed the reason was not that the algorithm lady was a descendent of Gerardus. And, heck, you are probably toying with me and knew all along why Gerardus Mercator’s name is as famous among navigators as it is infamous in the Holy See, see.

Yup, ole Gerry Mercator was guilty of creating the longitude latitude system and getting those lines drawn all over the globe and enabling your GPS to tell you where you are in the world with an accuracy of three or four yards. Hey, ole Gerry was a cartographer before they even called it that.

Miz Algorithm Lady called her product Mercator because the product is a data mapper. It uses a mapping algorithm to convert data from one format to another.

The mapping algorithm creator did not like for people to call the product a data translator. Transformator was also a bad word. I constructed a sign which I placed atop my monitor. It said:

It’s not a translator.

It’s not a transformator.

IT’S A TRANSFORMERCATOR.

That’s the truth.

Mercator loved that name. The Mercator Company, I mean. Not Gerardus, the cartographer but Miz Algorithm Lady. They did not capitalize on the name, however. But, I did.

I offered my services for a while as a Mercator mapping engineer. My thinking was that when people did a search for Mercator they would also get Transformercator. But that depends on the search engine and the way you set up the search.

And the fact that the stock fell from $150 a share to $2.50 a share did not help me either. On two accounts. One, not many Mercator software engineers were necessary after Mercator failed to file third quarter. Two, I had all my money in that stock.

But, three, and positively, I had a word coined that has seen me through thick and thin, and fourth, I changed my allegiance from software stock to navigational systems. One, anyway: transformercator.

For one thing, I liked the word because I am a philologist and a linguist and a language lover and a vocabulary nut and a crossword fanatic and……I just have as much fun as a catholic with a rosary or a baswan with a mantra or a Jew with a qaballah flipping through the syllables of ‘transformercator’.

Its parts actually work together to suggest a whole. That’s more than can be said about many words. Especially coined ones. Trans means across and form means to create. Transform means to form a cross. No, sorry, it means to change form. When you add the mercator part it just darlingly suggests that one is about to remap something and as a result transform it. And whammo. You are back to latitudes and longitudes again. And navigating through whatever storms, meteorological or mental, spacially or spiritually. Who knows? Maybe that something is one’s life.

But, whichever, you have been here and done that and you need some change — trans — and it is –for– (that is a preposition and it needs an object like maybe) Mercator who knows something about getting around, as in navigating, because focus, like rosaries and mantras give, is OK but, change is inevitable and that is good because change is almost always beneficial because if nothing else it gives your imagination some exercise in imagining where you are, where you are headed, and along the road that is not so well traveled, you will probably get the solitude you need to figure out why.

So, see, for a second thing, that Mercator, the company, and that Mercator, the cartographer, gave me that word and now I give it to you through creating this web site in my own brand of paying it forward and if Catherine Ryan Hyde does not my mind I will just let you tack this article on as an epilogue to her book and if she does not like it, she is not far from here and she can just come over and tell me so and we can stroll around MiraVidA for a while and talk it over.

But, really, I built this site for you and for your edification, navigation, with a strong wish for you to vector whatever victory you need every time you visit here.