Crepuscule (pronounced kri-puhs-kyool or krep-uh-skyool)
(1) Twilight; dusk.
(2) By extension, a brief period of transition between
two states.
1350-1400: From the Middle French crepuscule, from the thirteenth century Old French crépuscule, from the Latin crepusculum (morning or evening twilight),
the construct being crepus- (akin to creper (dark, dusky; obscure)) + -culum, the accusative singular of cūlus (a vulgar term for the buttocks)
from the Proto-Italic kūlos, from the
primitive Indo-European kul-, from kew- (to cover), the cognates for which
included the Old Irish cúl (bottom)
and the Lithuanian kẽvalas (skin,
cover); it was related to cutis (hide). Crepuscule, crepuscle & crepusculum are nouns,
crepuscular is an adjective; the noun plural is crepuscules.
Before the provision of electricity which by the
twentieth century meant much of the world was no longer constrained in their
activities by the hours of sunlight, even other forms of artificial light could
be variously expensive, unavailable or unreliable so sunlight was important,
socially and economically so it’s not surprising a number of words evolved to
describe the transition from light to dark including blackness, dark, dusk, gloom,
obscurity, twilight, sundown, sunset, black, blackout, brownout, cloudiness, dimness,
duskiness, eclipse, lightlessness, murk, murkiness, nightfall, blue hour,
gloaming, evenfall, fogfall & smokefall.
Lindsay Lohan in daylight (left), as the crepusculum descends (centre) and in the dark of night (right).
The most attractive of these is twilight, an evocative word
and one to which poets have always been drawn, whether to suggest some sense of
uncertainty or the last days of life before the darkness of death. Twilight was from the Middle English twilight & twyelyghte, the construct being twi-
(double, half-) + light, thus literally “second light, half-light”. It was cognate with the Scots twa-licht, twylicht & twielicht (twilight), the Low German twilecht & twelecht (twilight),
the Dutch tweelicht (twilight, dusk)
and the German Zwielicht (twilight,
dusk). In the Old English, the form was twēone lēoht (twilight). The curious word twilit (the simple past tense
and past participle of twilight) has long intrigued etymologists. According to the Oxford English Dictionary (OED)
the earliest known use dates only from 1869 and the speculation is it was
coined by someone who found the conventional forms (twilitten & twilighted)
inelegant. Smokefall (the close of the
day before nightfall, when fog comes) was apparently used as early as the eleventh
century and reflects the use of “smoke” in some regional dialects to refer
variously to darkness, smoke and fog. After
thing became more precise, it was re-purposed to describe “the soot which falls
from a cloud of smoke” and much later was adopted by those creating special
effects to mean “an artificial waterfall of smoke for shows”, the smoke (sometimes
combined with a mist of fine water vapor) used to reflect images created by
light projection.
The development of languages in cultures of course
reflects their environment and priorities although the oft-repeated claim that the
Inuit and other nations in arctic and sub-arctic regions had 400 (the number
does vary from source to source) words for “snow” are misleading although linguistic
anthropologists have explored this on a number of occasions and all have
concluded there are at least a few dozen and if the net is cast wider to
encompass all aspects of snow (types of tracks in snow, suitability for
wildlife etc), then the number is in three figures. Linguistics is a discipline which illustrates
structural functionalism in its pure form: words are created according to need
and remain in use if they fulfill a useful purpose. To most living in urban environments in industrial
societies “snow” is adequate for most situations but those running ski-fields
need more nuances while for the peoples in arctic regions, the correct description
of the type of snow they will soon have to traverse can be the difference
between life and death.
