Here let me get something of my chest; I HATE the term xenomorph as the proper name for the creature featured in the Alien franchise.

Now I fully sympathize with people in that using the word ‘alien’ as a proper name is clumsy to the point of stupidity. Science-fictions, and SF movies are overrun with aliens of ever strip and creed from the Mu-Tants of This Island Earth to Mr. Spock of Star Trek and countless others, so trying call one particular breed of alien, The Alien, make for grammatical suicide.

Now, this is not the first time a film has failed to named a monster in the text of the script leaving it to the fans, or even the culture at large, to find a proper name for the beastie. Perhaps the best example is one that many people have no clue is an example, zombies.

Say the word zombie and it is not Haitian slaves toiling beyond death that comes to mind, but rather ravenous hordes of animated corpses seeking to dine on tender living flesh. This modern revenant was birth in Night of the Living Dead, and the word zombie doesn’t appear in that film at all. The closest we get to a proper noun is ‘ghoul.’ I’m not certain but I think zombie came about because of the Italian film Zombie 2, and their re-titling of Dawn of The Dead as Zombie.

So where do we get the horrid term, xenomorph for the monster from Alien. Well aside from the root structure ‘xeno’ meaning strange or alien and ‘morph’ meaning shape, the term seems to come from James Cameron’s script for Aliens. Lt Gorman, during the briefing mentions that ‘a xenomorph may be involved.’

‘A xenomorph,’ the use of the phrase right there tells you it is NOT a proper fucking noun! They had never heard of thiscreature, Ripley was not believed when she described the attack on the Nostromo’s crew, so they certainly didn’t have a name for the beastie, and yet fandom seems to have latched onto this single word, in this single use, to craft a name for the creature.

So how do we name the creature? Well, we’ve been naming things for untold thousands of years; if you look at Genesis the right way God’s commandment to Adam was to give things their names. Naming things is what we do.

First, where did you find the beastie?

If you go back and listen to Alien closely you’ll learn that the crew of the Nostromo is awaken when they are near Zeta 2 Reticuli, part of a binary start system about 39 light years from Earth.  There, now we know where they found the animal.

What does it do?

Well, it’s pretty clear it is a parasite, a creature that lives in the body and off the metabolism of another animal or lifeform.

So what do you name this creature you unhappily discovered?

The Zeta Reticulian Parasite.

You could shorten it down to the Reticulian Parasite, but there are 4 main stars and 11 secondary stars in that constellation, if you found another parasite around one of those stars you’d have trouble, so I’d go with Zeta Reticulian Parasite.

No go forth and use this name damn it, ‘cause you just sound silly calling it a ‘xenomorph.’