August 24, 2017

Case File #017.08.24: ECLIPSE

Well, the great American solar eclipse of 2017 has come and gone. And it was pretty freakin' cool, especially for those of us who were lucky enough to see it from the path of totality and thus enjoy the short but breathtaking spectacle of the sun's corona glowing out around the circumference of the moon. But as you watched the moon blot out the life-giving sun, did you pause to wonder how the word eclipse became part of the English lexicon? I didn't think so. Don't worry, though, because I'm going to tell you about it now. The word's roots wind all the way back to the classical Greek verb ekleipein, which meant “to forsake its usual place” or “to fail to appear,” and its derivative noun, ekleipsis. The latter was itself only occasionally used in our modern-day sense of “the total or partial obscuring of one celestial body by another,” but when the noun passed into Latin as eclipsis, Latin speakers dropped the more common meanings of the Greek source and used their new word solely in reference to the astronomical event. Later, Old French speakers borrowed the Latin eclipsis but converted it into two words: the noun eclipse, which retained the Latin's meaning, and the verb eclipser, which meant, natch, “to cause an eclipse.” Sometime during the second half of the thirteenth century, the Old French eclipse passed directly into English, though English speakers used this form for both the noun and the verb (retaining for each, of course, the respective Old French senses). Then around 1385, the English noun acquired its additional figurative senses of “a falling into obscurity or decline” and “the loss of significance or power in relation to someone or something else,” and later that same decade, the verb took on its corresponding figurative senses of “to obscure or block out (something else)” and “to surpass or outshine the importance, fame, or reputation of someone or something else.”

©2017 Michael R. Gates