A sustained thought on "blue"
"Blue Moon: The earliest known recorded usage was in 1528, in a pamphlet entitled Rede Me and Be Not Wrothe: “Yf they say the mone is belewe / We must beleve that it is true” [If they say the moon is blue, we must believe that it is true]."
― Wikipedia: http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Blue_moon
belewe, blue / beleve, believe
It appears to me that the poet was doing a little word-play on two words that in the 16th century must’ve sounded very much (if not exactly) alike. Because spelling hadn’t been standardized at the time, writing was generally phonetic. I wonder if the derivation of the “blue” in blue moon is a mistranslation of “believe” and has to do with the credulity of the event – a second full moon in a single month, or a fourth full moon in a season.
“Beloved” and “believe” are naturally related, and the full moon is universally associated with young love and discreet sexual encounters. A beloved moon is a blue moon. Lief in Dutch is love in English, and lief survives in English today, not only in be-lief, but also on its own, to mean, “ready and willing”. Interestingly, blue may have been one of the last colors to be named. It’s Indo-European roots are “to shine, flash, burn,” which certainly makes sense in terms of the chromatic spectrum of temperature, with blue merging into white hot. The sky, being blue, was synonymous with bright. So it’s not surprising to find both black and blue having the same etymologies; once blue became associated with the sky, whether it was day or night the sky remained “blue”.
So blue moon could also have come from “bright” moon. I also like the etymology that has “blush” related to blue, with the idea that a blue moon is a blushing moon, going back to its associations with sexual trysts. I’d be curious to learn how other language traditions describe full moons, what metaphors they use, and whether the associations can be traced to a particular culture, whether or not the language or the words themselves were adopted.
Linguists obsessed with the technical descriptions of language do more good when they expand their scholarship into broader cultural patterns – how meaning and metaphor trickle across continents, shifting paradigms and widening perception. Linguistics, I think, needs to become part of a broader science of consciousness, and consciousness needs to be understood as inseparable from, if not synonymous with, culture. The synergy of civilizations, whether self-destructive, self-sustaining, genocidal or compassionate, are organized around the implied meanings and explicit metaphors of their languages. Meaning and metaphor is the meta-language we all speak, and the consciousness which, at least potentially, we all could share.
In a true science of consciousness, we’d need to first clear away the abstractions where the original metaphor has been lost. Language composed of empty abstractions is mindless, unconscious. In a sense, a science of consciousness would require that its practitioners all be poets. I don’t believe anyone can be truly conscious without also being a poet. Children charm us with the associations they make, pure, innocent, spontaneous poetry. But adults are often too quick to replace the fresh metaphor with an old one – or worse, a dead one, an abstraction – and slowly the child is acculturated into the prescribed boundaries of convention. As a result, perception itself is atrophied, consciousness is limited, even turned off, and replaced with an ideology of pure abstraction purged of living metaphor.
― Wikipedia: http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Blue_moon
belewe, blue / beleve, believe
It appears to me that the poet was doing a little word-play on two words that in the 16th century must’ve sounded very much (if not exactly) alike. Because spelling hadn’t been standardized at the time, writing was generally phonetic. I wonder if the derivation of the “blue” in blue moon is a mistranslation of “believe” and has to do with the credulity of the event – a second full moon in a single month, or a fourth full moon in a season.
“Beloved” and “believe” are naturally related, and the full moon is universally associated with young love and discreet sexual encounters. A beloved moon is a blue moon. Lief in Dutch is love in English, and lief survives in English today, not only in be-lief, but also on its own, to mean, “ready and willing”. Interestingly, blue may have been one of the last colors to be named. It’s Indo-European roots are “to shine, flash, burn,” which certainly makes sense in terms of the chromatic spectrum of temperature, with blue merging into white hot. The sky, being blue, was synonymous with bright. So it’s not surprising to find both black and blue having the same etymologies; once blue became associated with the sky, whether it was day or night the sky remained “blue”.
So blue moon could also have come from “bright” moon. I also like the etymology that has “blush” related to blue, with the idea that a blue moon is a blushing moon, going back to its associations with sexual trysts. I’d be curious to learn how other language traditions describe full moons, what metaphors they use, and whether the associations can be traced to a particular culture, whether or not the language or the words themselves were adopted.
Linguists obsessed with the technical descriptions of language do more good when they expand their scholarship into broader cultural patterns – how meaning and metaphor trickle across continents, shifting paradigms and widening perception. Linguistics, I think, needs to become part of a broader science of consciousness, and consciousness needs to be understood as inseparable from, if not synonymous with, culture. The synergy of civilizations, whether self-destructive, self-sustaining, genocidal or compassionate, are organized around the implied meanings and explicit metaphors of their languages. Meaning and metaphor is the meta-language we all speak, and the consciousness which, at least potentially, we all could share.
In a true science of consciousness, we’d need to first clear away the abstractions where the original metaphor has been lost. Language composed of empty abstractions is mindless, unconscious. In a sense, a science of consciousness would require that its practitioners all be poets. I don’t believe anyone can be truly conscious without also being a poet. Children charm us with the associations they make, pure, innocent, spontaneous poetry. But adults are often too quick to replace the fresh metaphor with an old one – or worse, a dead one, an abstraction – and slowly the child is acculturated into the prescribed boundaries of convention. As a result, perception itself is atrophied, consciousness is limited, even turned off, and replaced with an ideology of pure abstraction purged of living metaphor.
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