Jul
2
We See Change When It’s A Sea Change
July 2, 2009 |
The origin, history and nuance of words and phrases will usually excite the mind of a writerly type - and I say let’s revel in it! Thanks to the internet there are vast and deep rabbit holes filled with wonderful word sites of all kinds. An example of a recent foray into the web of words is when I finally found quite by accident the word for the uncomfortable feeling my husband gets when he touches velvet: Haptodysphoria. This is a big issue around here because I have a lot of velvet in my wardrobe! Another example of word-joy is the following: I’ve been thinking and blogging about Change, it being “the year of change” and all, and the phrase “a sea change” came to mind. I spent a lovely afternoon researching the origin of this delightful string of words and here is a bit of what I found and where I found it -
From Michael Quinlion of “World Wide Words“:
“Shakespeare obviously meant that the transformation of the body of Ferdinand’s father was made by the sea, but we have come to refer to a sea change as being a profound transformation caused by any agency. So pundits and commentators who think it has something to do with the ebb and flow of the tide, and use it for a minor or recurrent shift in policy or opinion, are doing a grave injustice to one of the most evocative phrases in the language. I wish a figurative full fathom five to such people.
The point at which it stopped being a direct quotation and turned into an idiom is hard to pin down, though it seems to have happened only in the latter part of the nineteenth century. The Oxford English Dictionary finds the first allusive use in one of Ezra Pound’s poems from 1917. But examples can be found a little earlier than that, as in The Great White Wall by Julian Hawthorne, dated 1877: “Three centuries ago, according to my porter, a sea-change happened here which really deserves to be called strange”.”
And…
From Grammarphobia:
The phrase was coined by Shakespeare in The Tempest to describe the vision of a drowned body. In Act I, scene 2, Ariel sings to Ferdinand about his father, Prospero:
“Full fathom five thy father lies:
Of his bones are coral made:
Those are pearls that were his eyes:
Nothing of him that doth fade
But doth suffer a sea-change
Into something rich and strange.”
The entry for “sea change” in The American Heritage Dictionary of the English Language includes this modern quote from the playwright Harold Pinter: “The script suffered considerable sea changes, especially in structure.”
P.S. I’d love to know if there is a word for the following phenomenon (if you know of it, please comment) - An odd experience when writing where I bounce a word into a sentence even though I am not quite sure what that word means, and then I look it up and find that it is the perfect word for what I am trying to express. In these moments it is almost like a muse has planted a seed. How could I have known without knowing? Did I subconsciously already know the definition of this word?