Oleg Kononenko has been in space since 15 September last year and has just broken the cumulative record for time in orbit of 879 days. Being Russian he is referred to as a cosmonaut. Americans are astronauts.
It seems odd that Russians can decide what English-speakers call their spacemen. It seemed odder to me that, when the Soviet Union promoted atheism, it should focus on the orderly universe that cosmos suggests.
Cosmos is an ancient Greek concept. Pythagoras was credited with seeing all things as an ordered cosmos. The meanings of cosmos in Greek included ordered troops in battle and the ornaments of a woman’s dress. The Latin equivalent of cosmos, mundus, could also mean ‘ornament’. Cosmos in the New Testament can signify the present age, the world as it is, as opposed to the heavenly future. Mundus likewise signified the mundane or worldly realm.
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