Potash of Carboniloroxy amilocitrate
This line stuck out for me whilst watching Arthur Christmas, an animated Christmas fantasy-comedy that features the hapless yet enthusiastic Arthur Claus, youngest son of a long line of inheritors of the position of Santa Claus, he is however ineligible due to being the youngest hence the heir is instead Stephen, the eldest son, a control-freak.
The patriarch of the family is the 136 years old "Grandsanta" Claus, who from the years 1871 - 1941 served as Santa Claus and used the traditional sleigh and applied "stardust" to it along with the reindeer to grant them the ability of flight.
Whilst helping his grandson, Arthur, in delivering a present to a little girl, he unveils the ancient sleigh that he once rode in, and thereto the flight-fuel: Carboniloroxy amilocitrate.
Naturally this belongs to the same honourable class of words such as science fiction jargon, i.e. technobabble, from series as Star Trek and Star Wars, but is there an actual etymological basis behind this seemingly random if impressive sounding hodgepodge of chemical compunds?
Short answer is, yes, otherwise there would not be an article here in the first place - the one which you are reading.
The first element of the name of this gravity-defying compound, which is said to derive fro an aurora-boralis, as postulated by the grandfather of the Claus family, is "carbo(ni)" thus inferring that the first chemical element of the material is carbon. The next seems to be nothing more than an interfix <-i-> to join together the elements: namely, "(ni)loroxy."
"Loroxy" eludes your humble writer, namely because it seems chiefly to be the name of medicine applied to depression (such as Laroxyl), meaning there is some underlying pun or message about Santa Claus really at heart being utterly despondent from stress over his momentous work - or - it stems from loroxanthin, a specific yellow plant pigment.
This gives us "carbon-plant-pigment."
The latter part of the name is amilocitrate, "citrate" being the name of an actual element, whereas "amilo" is the name of an ancient Greek city, with little to no connection with the dust itself. Looking elsewhere there is amyl, derived from Latin amylum meaning "starch", an adjective meaning appertaining to starch. Thus, citrate refers to salt-based stuff and amilo to starch, therefore "starch-salt (based chemicals)" as the last part.
We can conclude that the compound means that the stardust consist of a chemical mixture of carbon, red plant pigment, salt and starch, which hardly is what the Northern Lights consist of.
Yet, our quest continues!
Star dust, or presolar grains, to use its exact name, consist of varying minerals varying from diamonds to titanium, since the actual particular structure of such cosmic dust differ greatly from star to star. Can we with a certain amount of leeway say that it may possibly exist within the boundless depths of the universe, or am I merely spending too much time pondering what is basically technobabble in a family Christmas film?