11/28/2023 0 Comments Blue moomIn 1946, the amateur astronomer James Hugh Pruett wrote an article about the term "blue moon" for Sky & Telescope magazine. The final step in the evolution of the phrase (so far, at least) resulted from a journalist's error. But Hiscock thinks the simplest explanation may be the most compelling: "It seems to me absolutely possible that someone just took the English meaning, 'now and again,' and assigned this astronomical meaning." Other theories hold that almanacs started out printing the various types of moons in different colors, while still others assert that those third moons were bad luck, thus rendered blue. Some say that third moon was traditionally called "blue" in the Czech language, while others think the term comes from the French phrase double moon, "la deux lune," which sounds like blue moon. Theories abound as to why the publishers did this. Farmers' almanacs published in Maine began calling the third full moon in a season with four a "blue moon." However, on occasion, the dates will align in such a way that a season will experience four. Discussing diet, a character in an 1871 book admits to eating "a fruit pastry once in a blue moon."īecause each season is three months long, seasons typically have three full moons. The next literary reference came in 1869, when, in an autobiographical account of a shipwreck survivor, a man wrote of "that indefinite period known as a 'blue moon.'" Seven years later, the phrase appeared again, this time without explanation or quotation marks. "The note reads, 'Blue moon - this is usually intended to imply a long time.'" "A man is quoting someone on the street in London as saying, 'I haven't seen you this blue moon.' The author of the book gives a little note, and the note tells me this is a phrase he was unfamiliar with," Hiscock said. "It sort of slipped sideways from impossibility to a temporal notion of impossible in time," Hiscock said.įrom there, "blue moon" took a turn for the less stringent, eventually surfacing in 19th-century London as street slang for "a long time." Although it had probably been in use for a while, the slang first appeared in print in an 1821 book about working-class London. ![]() "The phrase was a kind of metaphor for absurdity or impossibility," Hiscock told Life's Little Mysteries.īy the 1700s, the phrase had acquired a related meaning: never. ![]() Aside from the occasional blue-tinged moon that can peak through a volcanic ash cloud, moons almost always hover between white and yellow, and so to call the moon blue was to state an absurdity.
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