On The Importance of Language and Artemis II

06 Apr, 2026

The phrase "dark side of the Moon" is doing damage to how people understand space. It sounds poetic, it's on a Pink Floyd album, and it is wrong. Last night I was cringing watching Sky News use it without a flicker of hesitation and they're far from alone. It's everywhere across media, and the charitable explanation is that outlets think they're meeting the public where they are mentally, or nodding to a popular cultural touchstone. The less charitable explanation is that nobody checked.

Either way: when you do nothing to dispel a myth, you invariably perpetuate it.

What's Actually Happening

The Moon is tidally locked to Earth, in other words it rotates once for every orbit it completes, But that is a statement about geometry relative to Earth, not about sunlight. The Sun does not care about our perspective.

At any given moment, half the Moon is lit and half is not. As it orbits, both the near side and the far side cycle through roughly two weeks of daylight and two weeks of night. They're out of phase with each other, when we see a full Moon, the near side is fully lit and the far side is in darkness, and vice versa at new Moon. But averaged across a lunar month, the split is equal.

The numbers

Neither side is permanently dark. The far side gets just as much sun as the other side.

What the Phrase Actually Means and Why It Matters

The "dark" in "dark side of the Moon" was never really about sunlight. It was about ignorance. We were in the dark and we used "dark" as a metaphor for that unknowing. That's a perfectly reasonable origin for a phrase. The problem is it's 2026 and we're still using it.

That changed in 1959, when the Soviet Luna 3 probe sent back the first images of the far side. The metaphor is expired. The word "dark" now actively misleads people into thinking it's a permanently shadowed place, and mainstream media keeps lovingly polishing that misconception because Pink Floyd made a album.

Don't use the language of the enemy. Every time we say "dark side," we're reinforcing a false model in people's heads. Language shapes thought. If you use the wrong word long enough, people stop questioning the premise entirely.

The Correct Mental Model

One lunar month (~29.5 Earth days)
─────────────────────────────────────────────────────────

Near side  ████████████░░░░░░░░░░░░░░░░░░  ← lit, then dark
Far side   ░░░░░░░░░░░░░░░████████████████  ← dark, then lit

           Day 0          Day 14          Day 28

Both sides lit equally. Out of phase. Neither permanently dark.

A Better Term

The correct term is the far side. It's geometrically precise: it's the side that faces away from Earth. No poetic baggage, no false implication of permanent darkness. Simple, accurate, done.

This matters because this kind of language capture happens constantly, and usually not by accident.

Sideloading. In the Apple context, sideloading is simply installing software something PC users do constantly without blinking. Apple engineered the term to make a routine computing action sound furtive and risky. Like you're going around a fence rather than through a gate. The word does lobbying work. It frames their walled garden as the default and everything outside it as a transgression. And it worked people repeat it uncritically.

The cloud. There is no cloud. The cloud is someone else's computer. Specifically, it is a server in a warehouse, owned by a corporation, subject to their terms of service, their security practices, their financial survival, their legal obligations to hand data over when asked, and their judgment about whether your account should continue to exist tomorrow.

VPNs and privacy. Following naturally from the above: a VPN a Virtual Private Network is widely marketed as a privacy tool after all privacy is in the name! The implication is that your traffic becomes invisible (if you've even listened to any podcaster sponsor spot, you may believe this). What it actually does is shift the point of trust. Instead of your internet provider seeing your traffic, your VPN provider sees your traffic. That's the whole transaction. The VPN host can log everything that passes through their servers. Many do. Several have been caught doing exactly that while explicitly advertising a no-logs policy. You have not achieved privacy. You have chosen a different landlord.

I have a follow-up post planned RE:This

Essential oils. The word "essential" in chemistry means of the essence of the volatile aromatic compounds extracted from a plant. It says nothing about biological necessity. But tiktok wellness has successfully exploited the collision with "essential" as in vital, required, fundamental so you get people convinced that inhaling diffused plant extracts is somehow equivalent to meeting a dietary requirement.

Tourette's and swearing. I recently saw the film I, Swear and it was excellent. It does important work bringing Tourette syndrome to a wider audience. It also continues a myth that does real harm to people living with the condition: that Tourette's sufferers predominantly and uncontrollably swear. The medical term for this is coprolalia, and it affects roughly 10% of people with Tourette's. The vast majority of tics are motor - blinking, head movements, throat clearing or involve non-offensive vocalisations. The swearing version is dramatic, it's filmable, it gets laughs or gasps, and so it dominates the cultural representation entirely.

I freely accept some of these examples fit better into the wider point.

The pattern in all of these cases is identical you smuggle in a false assumption, and once the assumption is embedded in the word, people stop interrogating it. Media outlets repeat it because it's familiar. Audiences absorb it and myths calcify.