cool sci-fish names with non-cool meanings

[SirKazum]

It's fairly clear, I think, that Lovecraft thought he was making up a word and didn't realise that it had a real-life meaning. We know what he's trying to say - that the perception of the subject was bizarre and didn't conform to what we recognise as normal dimensions - so I didn't mean to bring it up out of mockery. It just amused me.

Speaking of making sense of what Lovecraft meant with "non-Euclidean", using what we know about actual non-Euclidean geometry (as well as general relativity, as it happens), I like the paper that Benjamin Tippett, of the Titanium Physicists podcast, made about it: Possible Bubbles of Spacetime Curvature in the South Pacific. He goes to the text of the story "The Call of Cthulhu" and uses General Relativity as a possible explanation for all the phenomena it describes, going into detail about how everything works. BTW, he's also done similar papers on Superman's powers and how the TARDIS might work.

[Ajustusdaniel]

Why has no-one mentioned the sci-fish called "babel"?

As for terms that sounds better than they are, some of HP Lovecraft's Cthulhu Mythos should count as sci-fi and he was very fond of using obscure adjectives that were actually quite tame in meaning:

gibbous - (of the moon) between half-full and full
rugose - wrinkled
squeamous - scaly

etc.

Neil Gaiman has a bit of fun with this in a short story, with a barfly in Innsmouth, England, translating a bit of Lovecraftian prose as "The moon was almost full, and everyone was bloody peculiar frogs," or something of that nature.