Why is that? If Hourglass Circulate (or Phantom Hourglass Circulate, or Do Your Part, Hourglass Circulate) is acceptable to describe the last motion, why not the earlier one?
As it is, if the trailing ends do 1/2 Circulate from lines, they're out there on the borders of the formation, not in the center for a star -- no wonder dancers "can't see the star".
Does anyone know the reason Motivate has been defined this way?
Square dancing consists of a lot of what I've termed 'fuzzy' dancing, in the sense that dancers are often required to execute calls from setups in which some of the dancers are 1/2 of a position off from where they would need to be in order to start the call. (For example, from Parallel Waves after an Extend and Outsides 1/4 Right, consider a Diamond Circulate. In this case, after the 1/4 Right, the outsides are not really on Diamond footprints since they are 1/2 of a position forward or backward from precisely standing on the Diamond footprints. But, in reality, they are 'close enough', and the dancers do the slight adjustment and do the Diamond circulate anyway). (Similarly, from Twin Diamonds after a Diamond Circulate & Roll, a caller could call Ping Pong Circulate. Again, in this case the dancers aren't precisely on the 1/4 Tag footprints prior to the Ping Pong Circulate. But again, the dancers do it anyway). The bottom line is that as long as the caller can unambiguously get the dancers to do what he/she wants, then it's a legal call.
For the definitions of calls like Motivate (and Relay The Top), we define the Outsides to do a 1/2 Circulate (while the Centers are Casting 3/4) which results in a Center Diamond. This Center Diamond is then used as a Star since those who did the 1/2 Circulate are only 1/2 of a position away from being in a 'real' Star. Some sets of definitions (at a cost of being a little wordier) say something like '1/2 Circulate to form a Center Star'. After turning the Center Star (while the Others Trade), the last part for the Star dancer who does not connect with the Line/Wave Of 6 has historically been defined as 'move up to become an End of a wave'. Since this phase is rather fuzzy (and since some of these calls are nowadays used from T-Bones or Phantom setups) we attempt to be more precise by saying 'Phantom Hourglass Circulate'.
So in answer to your first question, 'why isn't the movement described as Phantom Hourglass Circulate when the ends of lines move TO the star?'... It could be defined as a Phantom Hourglass Circulate, but defining it as a 1/2 Circulate suffices. On the other hand, when the star dancers move up to become the ends of lines, we don't have any term like '1/2 Circulate' to describe that movement, so we have to either define it as 'move up' or define it in terms of a higher-level call such as 'Phantom Hourglass Circulate'. Note that when writing definitions, we try to define everything in terms of 'the lowest common denominator'. We don't like to use terms such as Phantom Hourglass Circulate in a call definition, because then only challenge dancers have a chance of understanding the definitions.
Here are some more reasons why (on a Motivate) the End moving INTO the star is not defined as a Phantom Hourglass Circulate...
By the way, in the first formation given above (Parallel Waves after the Centers Box Counter Rotate 1/4), there are several callers who call Motivate from this setup and expect the Centers to do a Box Circulate (instead of an All 8 Circulate). Most challenge callers believe calling Motivate from this position is illegal because the first part of the call is an (All 8) Circulate, and hence the the first move for the Out-Facing Center would be to Circulate straight ahead.
