Oscar

The Oscar statuette awarded to Jiří Menzel’s 1966 film Closely Watched Trains (Ostře sledované vlaky). The Czech film won the award for Best Foreign Language Film at the 40th Academy Awards in 1968.

8 March 2023

The annual awards of the US Academy of Motion Picture Arts and Science are popularly dubbed the Oscars. How the name became associated with the awards is unknown, but there are many competing claims for its coinage. The awards were first presented in 1929, and Oscar became associated with them in the early 1930s.

Brazilian film scholar Waldemar Dalenogare Neto uncovered the earliest known use of Oscar in reference to the awards in a newspaper column by Relman Morin that appeared in the Los Angeles Evening Post-Record of 5 December 1933:

What's happened to the annual Academy banquet? 

As a rule, the banquet and the awarding of "Oscar," the bronze statuette given for best performances, is all over long before this.

But so far, not even a mention of the affair.

Ten days later, a second use of the name appeared in the Seattle Star:

Cause of Worry

Away from here it probably doesn’t mean much to you, but Hollywood is very much interested in what has become of the annual dinner and “award” of the Academy. Its full title is the Academy of Motion Picture Arts and Sciences, and each year it has been holding a dinner and presenting bronze [sic] statuette to the actor or actress voted as having turned in the best role for the season. Last year it went to Helen Hayes.

It should have been over long before this, but to date “Oscar,” which is the players’ pet name for the statue, is without an owner. It is whispered that the vote gave it to one of the 40-odd actors who withdrew from the academy last spring to join an actor group affiliated with the A.F.L.

Prior to the discovery of these 1933 uses, the earliest known use of Oscar as a name for the Academy Award was in a New York Daily News column by Sidney Skolsky bearing a dateline of 16 March 1934. The column uses Oscar several times:

The Academy of Motion Picture Arts and Sciences made its annual awards for the outstanding achievements in the motion picture field at their banquet in the Ambassador Hotel this evening.

These awards mean to Hollywood what the Pulitzer prize means to dramatists and novelists. It is the picture people’s main incentive to strive for “artistic achievement” in an industry where their worth is judged by box office figures.

At tonight’s banquet the winners, while movieland looked on and applauded, were presented with bronze statues. To the profession these statues are called Oscars.

[…]

The Oscar for the best production of the year went to Fox for “Cavalcade.” This picture, which rated four stars in The News, was awarded the prize in competition with such four-star specials as “Little Women,” Smilin’ Thru” and “I Am a Fugitive from a Chain Gang.”

[…]

Laughton, who started as a kitchen clerk in the Claridge Hotel in London, also was not present to receive his little Oscar. This actor at present is touring the provinces of England in Shakespearean plays at a $100-per-week salary. He always wanted to prove he could act.

The Oscar for the best direction went to Frank Lloyd for “Cavalcade.”

Saral [sic] Y. Mason and Victor Heerman will take turns on the Oscar for their adaptation on “Little Women.” And the award for the best original story of the year went to Robert Lord for “One Way Passage.”

Skolsky would mention Oscar again in his column the next day:

The Academy Awards met with the approval of Hollywood, there being practically no dissension…The Academy went out of its way to make the results honest and announced that balloting would continue until 8:00 o’clock of the banquet evening…Then many players arrived late and demanded the right to vote…So voting continued until 10:00 o’clock or for two hours after the ballot boxes were supposed to be closed…It was King Vidor who said: “This year the election is on the level”…Which caused every one [sic] to comment about the other years…Although Katherine Hepburn wasn’t present to receive her Oscar, her constant companion and the gal she resides with in Hollywood, Laura Harding, was there to hear Hepburn get a round of applause for a change…The number of votes actually cast for these highly-touted prizes are kept a secret, but if you must know there were only about eight hundred votes cast.

Despite the fact that his original column referred to Oscar as an already existing industry term, Skolsky would later claim that he coined the name for this column in an attempt to deflate some of the hype and puffery surrounding the awards. He said the inspiration came from an old vaudeville bit where a comedian onstage would kid the orchestra leader with the question, “Will you have a cigar, Oscar?” But given the earlier citations of its use, he clearly was not the originator of the name. (Trivia: the original Oscar in the vaudeville bit was Oscar Hammerstein I, grandfather of the playwright/lyricist, who in addition to being a composer and theater impresario, also owned a cigar factory.)

In a 1972 book, screenwriter Frances Marion recalled that Walt Disney referred to the award he won at the same 1934 ceremony that Skolsky attended as Oscar. He may have, but Disney won many Oscars, and nearly forty years after the fact Marion could very well have misremembered the date.

As to the term’s coinage, the Academy itself is non-committal, but seems to favor one of its own as the coiner. Academy press statements often credit the coinage to Margaret Herrick, née Gledhill, who started working as the Academy’s librarian in 1931 and would rise to become its executive secretary. Supposedly, on her first day of work she saw one of the statuettes and declared that it looked like her Uncle Oscar. While the tale is plausible, there is no evidence to support Herrick’s coinage.

Bette Davis is often credited with the coinage because at the 1936 ceremony she referred to her award as Oscar. According to Davis, the statue’s backside reminded her of her then husband Harmon Oscar Nelson. But clearly the name was already in well established by this date.

Others credit John LeRoy Johnston, a Hollywood photographer and public relations director with the coinage. Again, there is no direct evidence for this claim. In his blog post on the possible origins of Oscar, Peter Jensen Brown suggests that the inspiration may have been Oscar Smith, a Black actor and Hollywood boot black who was well-known to the Hollywood elites. While it’s nice to think that he would be so honored in an era when Black contributions to Hollywood were often overlooked, there’s no reason to think that is actually the case. Lots of people associated with films of the era were named Oscar, and there needs to be evidence to connect any individual Oscar with the award before such a claim can be considered.

Perhaps the most intriguing possibility is that the name Oscar comes not from the artistic side of Hollywood, but rather from the technical one. Among acoustical engineers of the era, oscar was jargon for oscillation. The term appears in glossaries as early as 1929 and specifically in one in the 1931 Motion Picture Almanac. Furthermore, the Academy’s first Scientific and Technical Awards were presented in 1931 and several of the early awards went to advancements in sound engineering. And in making the transition from oscillation to statuette, in the early 1930s, Bell Labs developed a wax manikin for calibration and equalization of binaural audio signals—just as humans have two ears, one on each side of the head, the manikin had microphones in place of ears. The engineers at Bell Labs named the manikin Oscar. A description appears in the April 1932 issue of Popular Science:

A wax dummy serves as critic during the orchestra rehearsals of Leopold Stokowski, famous conductor. Named “Oscar,” it sits through a performance at the Philadelphia Academy of Music with an impassive expression on its molded face. But its ears never miss a note, for they are twin microphones connected to an amplifying system and earphones. By listening in, engineers can determine the best arrangement of the orchestra for radio broadcasting purposes.

It is highly probable that Hollywood sound engineers were aware of the manikin and the work at Bell Labs, and perhaps it was some anonymous sound engineer who dubbed the statuette Oscar. And we have another award name that followed a similar path. The name Emmy, the name of the award given for similar awards in television, comes from industry slang Immy, short for image orthicon, a type of vacuum tube used in early television production. While the evidence for this hypothesis is circumstantial, it is more substantial than the evidence for any of the other explanations.

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Sources:

Academy of Motion Picture Arts and Science. “History of the Scientific and Technical Awards.” Oscars.org.

Brown, Peter Jensen. “Envelope Please—Unwrapping Oscar’s Origin Stories.” Early Sports and Pop Culture History Blog, 22 February 2019.

Dalenogare Neto, Waldemar. “Descoberta: primeira menção ao nome Oscar na imprensa.” Criticas de Filmes (blog), June 2021. (In Portugeuse).

Holden, Anthony. Behind the Oscar: The Secret History of the Academy Awards. Toronto: Viking, 1993, 84. Archive.org.

“Hollywood from the Inside.” Seattle Star, 15 December 1933, 16/2. Newspapers.com.

Lawson, James Eric. “Re: [ADS-L] Antedating of ‘Oscar’ (Discovered by Brazilian Film Scholar).” ADS-L, 26 February 2023.

Morin, Relman. “Cinematters.” Evening Post-Record (Los Angeles), 5 December 1933, 4/2. Newspapers.com. [The database’s metadata has this appearing on page 2.]

The Motion Picture Almanac. New York: Quigley, 1931, 94. Archive.org.

Oxford English Dictionary, third edition, September 2004, s.v. Oscar, n.3.

Paul, Stephan. “Binaural Recording Technology: A Historical Review and Possible Future Develpments." Acta Acustica, 95, September 2009, 767–88 at 769–70. ResearchGate.

Popik, Barry. “Oscar (Academy Award).” Barrypopik.com, 23 December 2007.

Popular Science, April 1932, 48. Google Books.

Sands, Pierre Norman. A Historical Study of the Academy of Motion Picture Arts and Sciences (1927–1947). PhD dissertation, University of Southern California, 1966. New York: Arno Press, 1973, 91n. Archive.org.

Scheuer, Philip K. “Talkies Give New Tongue.” Los Angeles Times, 24 November 1929, 26/6. ProQuest Historical Newspapers.

Shapiro, Fred. “[ADS-L] Antedating of ‘Oscar’ (Discovered by Brazilian Film Scholar).” ADS-L, 25 February 2023.

Skolsky, Sidney. “Films Crown Hepburn, Laughton Year’s Best.” Daily News (New York), 17 March 1934, Brooklyn Final Edition, 3/2, 23/2. Newspapers.com. [Note: Not all editions of the paper carry the column.]

———. “Hollywood” (18 March 1934). Daily News (New York), 19 March 1934, 32/3. Newspapers.com

Photo credit: Martin Vorel, 2017. Wikimedia Commons. Public domain image.

galaxy / Milky Way

6 March 2023

The arch of the Milky Way above the Atacama Desert, Chile. The bright dot near the top of the arch is Jupiter, elongated due to the panoramic projection. The two Magellanic Clouds can be seen to the left. The curved line to the right of the image is the trail of an airplane.

Galaxy is a word that dates to antiquity but one whose primary meaning has shifted over the centuries as our scientific understanding of the universe has grown. Galaxy is from the post-classical, i.e., the fifth century, Latin galaxias, which in turn came from the Hellenistic Greek γαλαξίας (milky circle). Galaxias appears in Anglo-Latin by the twelfth century, and parallel borrowings of the word are found in many present-day European languages.

The Greek γαλαξίας (galaxias), meaning milky circle, is a giveaway to the original meaning. For most of the word’s life, galaxy referred to what we in English call the Milky Way, the band of light that stretches across the night sky (at least where light pollution is minimal). The names come from Greco-Roman myth, a story that is recorded in Pseudo-Erastothenes’s Katasterismoi (Constellations), a text from the first century C.E. but which draws upon earlier sources:

The Galaxy is one of the heavenly circles. It was not possible for the sons of Zeus to share in heavenly honor before one of them had been nursed by Hera. And so, they say that Hermes brought Herakles just after his birth and placed him at Hera’s breast, and that he was nursed by her. When Hera discovered the trick, she pushed Herakles away and the remaining milk was spilled, forming the Galaxy.

(The text was long attributed to the third-century B.C.E. mathematician Erastothenes of Cyrene, but he is no longer thought to be the author, hence the credit to the anonymous Pseudo-Erastothenes.)

Galaxy appears in English by the close of the fourteenth century. John Trevisa’s translation of Bartholomæs Anglicus’s De proprietatibus rerum (On the Properties of Things) uses it, although Trevisa uses the Latin inflections:

De galaxia siue lacceo circulo. Capitulum viii.

Galaxias is a cercle of heuen more faire and briȝt þanne oþir cercles, and passiþ by þe myddel of heuen; and bygynneþ from þe est, and passiþ to þe norþ by þe signes þat hatte Cancer and Capricornus and eft to his owne poynt. And þis cercle hatte “þe milky cercle”, for amonge alle þe cerclis of heuen þat cercle is most briȝt and clere and most notable.

(About the galaxy or milky circle. Chapter 8.

The galaxy is a circle of heaven more fair and bright than other the other circles, and it passes through the middle of heaven; it begins in the east and passes to the north by the signs that are called Cancer and Capricorn and then back to its own point. And this circle is called “the milky circle,” for among all the circles of heaven this circle is the most bright and clear and most notable.)

But at about the same time, Chaucer uses the word in his poem The House of Fame, and there is no doubt that the word had been assimilated into English here:

“Now,” quod he thoo, “cast up thyn yë.
Se yonder, loo, the Galaxie,
Which men clepeth the Milky Wey
For hit is whit (and somme, parfey,
Kallen hyt Watlynge Strete).”

(“Now,” he then said, “cast up your eye.
See yonder, lo, the galaxy,
Which men call the Milky Way
For it is white (and some, by my faith,
Call it Watling Street).”)

(Watling Street was a Roman road that ran from Dover to Chester and was a major thoroughfare in medieval England.)

This passage is also one of the earliest known to use the phrase Milky Way. Of course, those in antiquity and the Middle Ages, had no notion that the galaxy was just one of thousands and that the Milky Way was just what an island of stars looked like from our position inside of one. The extension of the word galaxy to encompass other nebulae in the night sky would come by the end of the seventeenth century. From John Fryer’s 1698 A New Account of East-India and Persia:

Steering now by the Crosiers, a South Constellation, taking its Name from the Similitude of that Pastoral Staff; as also supplied by the Magellanian Clouds, in number Two, (averred to be such by those that use this way continually) fixed as the North Star; but to me they seem no other than a Galaxia, caused by the Reflection of the Stars.

We now know, of course, that the Magellanic Clouds are two dwarf, elliptical galaxies that are part of our local group of galaxies, which also includes the spiral galaxies of Andromeda and Triangulum. It wouldn’t be until the twentieth century that astronomers recognized galaxies, including our own Milky Way, for what they are, and galaxy acquired the astronomical meaning that we use today.

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Sources:

Chaucer, Geoffrey. “The House of Fame.” The Riverside Chaucer, third edition. Larry D. Benson, ed. Boston: Houghton Mifflin, 1987, 359, lines 935–39.

Condos, Theony. The Katasterismoi of the Pseudo_Eratosthenes. PhD Dissertation. University of Southern California, August 1970, 224–27. ProQuest Dissertations.

Dictionary of Medieval Latin from British Sources, 2013, s.v. galaxias, n. Brepols: Database of Latin Dictionaries.

Fryer, John. A New Account of East-India and Persia. London: R.R. for Ri. Chiswell, 1698, 11. Early English Books Online (EEBO).

Middle English Dictionary, 2019, s.v. galaxie, n.

Oxford English Dictionary, third edition, November 2010, s.v. galaxy, n.; March 2002, s.v. Milky Way, n.

Pseudo-Eratosthenes. Katasterismoi (Constellations), part 2 of 2. Theony Condos, trans. San Francisco: Astronomical Society of the Pacific, Leaflet 467, November 1970, chap. 44, 8. SAO/NASA Astrophysics Data System.

Trevisa, John. On the Properties of Things: John Trevisa’s Translation of Bartholomæs Anglicus De Proprietatibus Rerum, vol. 1 of 3. M.C. Seymour, ed. Oxford: Clarendon Press, 1975, 8.8, 459. London, British Library, MS Additional 27944.

Photo credit: Bruno Gilli, European Southern Observatory (ESO), 2009. Licensed under a Creative Commons Attribution 4.0 International License.

beryl / beryllium

Three samples of beryl, from left to right morganite, aquamarine, and emerald

3 March 2023

Beryllium is a lightweight, gray metal that is strong and brittle. One of the lightest elements, it has an atomic number of four. Its symbol is Be. The name comes from beryl, a gemstone that contains the metal that has been known since antiquity. In Latin it is beryllus, which is borrowed from the Greek βήρυλλος. In Farsi and Arabic, it is ballur, بلور and كريستال, respectively. Beril appears in Anglo-Norman by the early twelfth century and then makes its way into Middle English by the end of the thirteenth.

Ancient sources are not precise in the usage of beryl, and in those writings the word can refer to a variety of similar stones. Today, beryl refers to a variety of minerals, all composed of beryllium aluminum silicate, including the gemstones aquamarine, emerald, heliodor, and morganite. And in medieval Latin, beryllus could also mean a crystal and even an eyeglass, hence the present-day German Brille for such a pair.

While the stone was well known, the metal we know as beryllium was not identified until 1798, when chemist Louis-Nicolas Vauquelin isolated beryllium oxide from the stone. He published his results in the Annales de Chimie, and the editors of that journal dubbed the oxide glucine on account of its sweet taste (as late as the twentieth century, it was a common practice for chemists to actually taste the materials they were working with and characterize them by that sense):

La propriété la plus caractéristique de cette terre, confirmée par les dernières expériences de notre collègue, étant de former des sels d’une saveur sucrée, nous proposons de l’appeler GLUCINE.

(The most characteristic property of this earth, confirmed by the latest experiments of our colleague, being to form salts of a sweet flavor, we propose to call it GLUCINE.)

Throughout the nineteenth century, glucine and glucina were the common names for beryllium oxide. In 1808, British chemist Humphry Davy proposed naming the element glucium:

Had I been so fortunate as to have obtained more certain evidences on this subject, and to have procured the metallic substances I was in search of, I should have proposed for them the names of silicium, alumium, zirconium, and glucium.

But four years later Davy proposed changing it to glucinum, an analogous change to what he did with aluminum:

8. Glucinum.

1. There is an earth which was discovered by Vauquelin in 1798, called glucine, or glucina. It may be obtained from the beryl or the emerald, by the following process […] There is great reason to believe that glucina is a compound of a peculiar metallic substance, which may be called glucinum, and oxygene.

But names based on beryl were also in use. Because other oxides, in particular yttrium oxide, were also sweet tasting, in 1802 Martin Klaproth proposed calling it Beryllina:

Um daher keine Verwechselung derselben mit der Yttererde zu veranlassen, würde es vielleicht gerathen seyn, jenen Namen Glykine aufzugeben, und durch Beryllerde (Beryllina) zu ersetzen.

(In order not to confuse it with yttria, it might be advisable to give up the name glycine and replace it with beryllia (Beryllina).)

Swedish chemist Jöns Jacob Berzelius was the first to use the name beryllium, and “Beryllium (Glucinum)” with the symbol “Be” appears in a table of elements in an 1814 English translation of his Attempt to Establish a Pure Scientific System of Minerology.

Over time, the name beryllium won out over the sweeter alternatives.

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Sources:

Anglo-Norman Dictionary, 2007, s.v. beril, n.

Berzelius, J. Jacob. Attempt to Establish a Pure Scientific System of Minerology. John Black, trans. London: Robert Baldwin, 118. HathiTrust Digital Archive.

Dana, James D. A System of Mineralogy, second edition. New York: Wiley and Putnam, 1844, 550. Nineteenth Century Collections Online.

Davy, Humphry. “Electro-Chemical Researches, on the Decomposition of the Earths.” Philosophical Transactions of the Royal Society, 98, 30 June 1808, 353. HathiTrust Digital Library.  

———. Elements of Chemical Philosophy. Philadelphia: Bradford and Inskeep, 1812, 203. HathiTrust Digital Library.

Dictionary of Medieval Latin from British Sources, 2013, s.v. beryllus, n. Brepols: Database of Latin Dictionaries.

Klaproth, Martin Heinrich. Beiträge zur Chemischen Kenntniss der Mineralkörper, vol. 3, 1802, 79. Google Books.

Middle English Dictionary, 2019, s.v. beril, n.

Oxford English Dictionary, second edition, 1989, s.v. beryllium, n., glucinum, n., beryl, n.

Vauquelin, Louis-Nicolas. “Analyse: De l’Aigue Marine, ou Béril” (“Analysis: Aquamarine or Beryl”). Annales de Chimie, 26, 1798, 169n. Google Books.

Wöhler, Friedrich. “Ueber das Beryllium and Yttrium.” Annalen der Physik und Chemie, 13, 1828, 577. Google Books.

Photo credit: Chris Ralph, 2007. Wikimedia Commons. Public domain image.

allege

Drawing of two men in medieval dress on horseback embracing each other. A retinue of courtiers, one holding a cross on a staff, surround them.

1 March 2023

To allege something is to advance a claim, to assert something as fact. It is primarily found in legal contexts. The etymology is quite straightforward, coming from the medieval Latin allegare by way of the Anglo-Norman alleger. It appears in Anglo-Latin writing c.1260.

The word appears in English shortly after, in a version of the life of Thomas Becket found in the South English Legendary written c.1300:

Þo seint Thomas to Rome cam : faire he was onder-fonge;
And sumdel þe pope was anuyed : þat he hadde i-beo so longe.
Men a-coupeden him of þulke trespass: þat the bischopes tolden er,
And beden him ansuerie for is stat : and allege þare-fore þer.
Seint Thomas would op arise : Men beden him sitte a-doun,
And he bigan a-godes name : and schewede þis reason.

(Then Saint Thomas came to Rome. He was well received, and the pope was somewhat annoyed that he stayed so long. Men  accused him of the crime the bishops had charged earlier and bade him to answer for his state and alleged a claim there. St. Thomas arose, though they bade him sit down. He sat beside the pope and argued his case.)

Its meaning has remained largely unchanged through the centuries, probably because of its use as a legal term of art.

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Sources:

Anglo-Norman Dictionary, 2007, s.v. allegger, v.

Dictionary of Medieval Latin from British Sources, 2013, s.v. allegare, v. Brepols: Database of Latin Dictionaries.

Horstmann, Carl, ed. “St. Thomas of Caunterbury.” The Early South-English Legendary. Early English Text Society. London: N. Trübner, 1887, lines 1367–1372. HathiTrust Digital Archive. Oxford, Bodleian Library MS Laud 108.

Middle English Dictionary, 2019, s.v. alleggen, allegen, v.(1).

Oxford English Dictionary, third edition, September 2012, allege, v.1.

Image credit: Matthew Paris (?), c. 1230. London, British Library Loan (from Getty Collection) MS 88, fol. 1v. Wikimedia Commons. Public domain image as a mechanical reproduction of a public domain work.

moon

27 February 2023

Total lunar eclipse, 8 November 2022

The moon is, of course, the large rock that is a satellite of planet Earth. Since one can hardly fail to notice it in the night sky, it is no surprise that the word moon is very old. It comes from a common Germanic root, and the Old English word for it was the masculine noun mona. (While mona is a masculine noun, there are rare attestations of the feminine mone translating or glossing the Latin luna, which is a feminine noun.)

We can see the Old English word in Ælfric of Eynsham’s treatise on astronomy, De temporibus anni (Of the Seasons of the Year), written in the closing years of the tenth century:

Soðlice se mona & ealle steorran underfoð leoht of ðære micclan sunnan · & heora nan næfð nænne leoman buton of ðære sunnan leoman; & ðeah ðe seo sunne under eorðan on nihtlicere tide scine · þeah astihð hire leoht on sumere sidan þære eorðan þe ða steorran bufon us onliht · & donne heo upagæð · heo oferswið ealra ðæra steorrena · & eac þæs monan leoht ·mid hire ormætan leohte.

(Truly, the moon and all the stars receive light from the mighty sun and none of them have any radiance except for the radiance of the sun. And although the sun shines under the earth during night hours, yet its light diminishes on the other side of the earth so that the stars above us are illuminated. And when it rises up it overpowers all of the stars and also the light of the moon with its boundless light.)

But mona and its Present-Day reflex moon have other meanings. Moon, for example, can refer to a lunar month, the twenty-eight-day period during which the satellite goes through all its phases. We see this sense in John Trevisa’s late fourteenth-century translation of Ranulf Higden’s Polychronicon:

Eusebius in his storie telliþ þat men in þe Est londes hilde Ester day þe fourtenþe day of þe mone of the first monþe, upon what day it evere byfel in þe monþe of Marche.

(Eusebius in his history says that men in eastern lands hold Easter day to be the fourteenth day of the moon of the first month, upon whatever day it falls in the month of March.)

And once Galileo discovered the four major Jovian satellites, moon started to be used more generically to refer to a satellite of any planet, not just the Earth’s. Robert Hooke uses this sense in a letter published in the Royal Society’s Philosophical Transactions in 1665:

From this rare Observation, he inferrs [sic] the Proportion of the Diameter of the Satellites to that of Jupiter; and judgeth, that no longer doubt can be made of the turning of these 4 Satellites, or Moons about Jupiter, as our Moon turns about the Earth, and after the same way as the rest of the Celestial Bodies of our Systeme do move: whence also a strong conjecture may be made, that Saturns Moon turns likewise about Saturn.

Hence he also taketh occasion to intimate, that we need not scruple to conclude, that if these two Planets have Moons wheeling about them, as our Earth hath one that moves above it, the conformity of these Moons with our Moon, does prove the conformity of our Earth with those Planets, which carrying away their Moons with themselves, do turn about the Sun, and very probably make their Moons turn about them in turning themselves about the Axis.

And moon acquired more figurative meanings as well. It can also mean something that is unobtainable. Poet John Skelton used it this way in his 1499 poem Bowge of Courte:

And syr in fayth why comste not vs amonge
To make the mery as other felowes done
Thou muste swere and stare man aldaye longe
And wake all nyghte and slepe tyll it be none
Thou mayste not studye or muse on the mone
This worlde is no thynge but ete drynke & slepe
And thus with vs good company to keep

(And sir, in faith why not come among us
To make merry as other fellows do
Man, you must swear and stare all day long
And stay awake all night and sleep till it is noon
You may not study or muse about the moon
This world is nothing but eat, drink, and sleep
And therefore keep company with us)

It can be a verb meaning to engage in listless or aimless activity. A 23 July 1793 letter by scholar and cleric (and grandson of the tea magnate) Thomas Twining uses it thusly:

If you chuse to moon further, by talking with a grave face of things you know nothing of.

And a piece that appeared in the May 1837 issue of Bentley’s Miscellany used mooning to refer to aimless wandering of the streets at night:

His occupation merely consisted in cleaning the whole house, answering the door, running errands, helping to cook the dinner, serving at table, pounding medicines, washing dishes, scouring knives and forks, and blacking shoes, mooning about the streets at night chalking his master’s name, and during his leisure moments he was advised to study physic, and wash out phials and gallipots; for which services he was put upon board wages, at the rate of ninepence per diem.

And Thomas Hardy’s 1878 novel The Return of the Native used the verb to moon in the sense of to indulge in reverie:

“How very ridiculous!” Thomasin murmured to herself in a tone which was intended to be satirical. “To think that a man should be so silly as to go mooning about like that for a girl’s glove! A respectable dairy man, too, and a man of money as he is now. What a pity!”

And moon came to mean something else entirely in the lower registers of the language, that is the buttocks. There is this utterly delightful passage from an anonymous 1756 novel, whose title I cannot resist giving in full: The Life and Memoirs of Mr. Ephraim Tristram Bates, Commonly Called Corporal Bates, A Broken-Hearted Soldier: Who, from a Private Centinel in the Guards, Was, from his Merits, Advanced, Regularly, to be Corporal, Serjeant, and Pay-Master Serjeant; and Had He Lived a Few Days Longer, Might Have Died a Commission-Officer. The passage in question is about Jenny, the wife of a tailor, and her childhood friend Elizabeth, or Betsy, who had married an aristocrat. One could write a book about a close reading of this passage and its class implications:

Jenny, another Comrade, had married an honest Breeches-maker; and whether the frequent Sights of those Objects had rendered here indelicate I can’t say, but she was no so soft in her Discourse as one should have expected from a Play and School-Fellow of Betsey’s:—“Aye, aye! we work hard for our Money; see my Fingers’ Ends here—stitching their filthy Thigh Cases:—But we drink as good Tea as my Lord and Lady.—I don’t suppose my Lord can shew as much ready Money as we—few of them can.—I do suppose when they come down, which I hear will be soon, that my Lady, forsooth, will be for renewing old Acquaintance, to get Credit in our Way. But his Moon Shall never be covered by me or Buck (which, O strange! was her Husband’s Name) ’till they put down the Ready—and no Brummagums.”

A brummagum or brummagem is a counterfeit coin.

And of course, the verb to moon means to deliberately expose one’s buttocks to the public. But this sense did not appear until the mid twentieth century. Here’s an example from the class notes for the class of 1963 in the Princeton Alumni Weekly for 7 July 1964

The class’s entry in the P-rade [sic] was admittedly not among the more colorful. We had no tiger in a cage as did ’39 nor did we have any risqué humor on pickets like ’62. All we had was Tim Callard leading the hard core in a cheer for Princeton and President Goheen and abortive efforts at mooning the Yale team in their dugout.

And like the previous quotation, the fact that this sense of mooning first appears in reference to an Ivy League institution says a lot between the lines.

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Sources:

Ælfric. Ælfric’s De Temporibus Anni. Heinrich Henel, ed. Early English Text Society, O.S. 213. London: Oxford UP, 1942, 12–14. Cambridge University Library, MS Gg.3.28.

Gouldin, David. “Class Notes: 63.” Princeton Alumni Weekly, vol. 64, 7 July 1964, 34. Google Books.

Hardy, Thomas. The Return of the Native, vol. 3 of 3. London: Smith, Elder, 1878, 276–77. HathiTrust Digital Archive.

Hooke, Robert. “Mr. Hook’s Answer to Monsieur Auzout’s Considerations.” Philosophical Transactions, 1, 1665, 74. HathiTrust Digital Archive.

The Life and Memoirs of Mr. Ephraim Tristram Bates, Commonly Called Corporal Bates, A Broken-Hearted Soldier: Who, from a Private Centinel in the Guards, Was, from his Merits, Advanced, Regularly, to be Corporal, Serjeant, and Pay-Master Serjeant; and Had He Lived a Few Days Longer, Might Have Died a Commission-Officer. London: Malachi ****, for Edith Bates, Relict of the Aforesaid Mr. Bates, 1756, 31–32. Eighteenth Century Collections Online (ECCO).

Oxford English Dictionary, third edition, December 2002, s.v. moon, n.1, moon, v.

“The Portrait Gallery.—No. II.” Bentley’s Miscellany, vol. 1, May 1837, 443. HathiTrust Digital Archive.

Skelton, John. Bowge of Courte. London: Wynken the Worde, 1499, B.3r–B3v. Early English Books Online (EEBO).

Trevisa, John. Polychronicon Ranulphi Higden Monachi Cestrensis: Together with the English Translations of John Trevisa and of an Unknown Writer of the Fifteenth Century, vol. 5 of 9. Joseph Rawson Lumby, ed. London: Longman, et al., 1874, 41. HathiTrust Digital Archive.

Photo credit: David Wilton, 2022.