Is it a ‘perigee-syzygy’ or a ‘supermoon’?

My husband was so delighted with the new-found term perigee-syzygy that he kept repeating it, until the syllables merged into his regular breathing and he fell asleep in his chair.

The compound word means what the vulgar press call a supermoon. A syzygy is the lining-up of the moon, Earth and sun, producing a full moon (or a new moon, which is invisible because only the far side is illuminated). The perigee is when the moon is nearest the Earth (its furthest being the apogee). The distance varies because the moon orbits the Earth in an ellipse. The funny-looking word syzygy, used in English since the 17th century, merely comes from the Greek for a yoke and is thus related to the grammatical term zeugma (‘straight home, in a flood of tears and a sedan-chair’ – The Pickwick Papers). When the moon is full and near its perigee it looks its biggest. The name supermoon for this was coined by the astrologer Richard Nolle only in 1979. The diameter of the moon appears 14 per cent greater than at the apogee.

Newspaper hype for perigee-syzygy moons annoys me by the embracing of North American nomenclature. On 5 November we’ll have a nice fat moon being billed as the Beaver Moon. We do not currently in Britain have wild beavers (unless they escape). But North American Indians are credited with doing something with beavers in November – kill them probably.

Similar objections apply to other full moons through the year such as the Worm Moon of March and the Sturgeon Moon of August. British English does have a genuine, old-fashioned name for a moon within a fortnight of the autumnal equinox of 22 or 23 September – the Harvest Moon. I suppose Samuel Palmer’s painting of the name comes to mind. As for the blue moon, blundering in America resulted in it being defined in 1946 as the second full moon in a month.