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.
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.