horizon - etymology & story - podictionary 560

Henry Kissinger once said:

“For other nations, Utopia is a blessed past never to be recovered; for Americans it is just beyond the horizon.”

This sounds like a nice sentiment but perhaps Kissinger should have
chosen another word than horizon.  As Mark Pattison, a 19th century
British author and teacher said:

“…the horizon recedes as we advance, and is no nearer at sixty than it was at twenty.”

If both these statements are true I guess we’ll never reach Utopia, but I think it’s still worth trying.

Our word horizon showed up in English back in the late
1300s and Geoffrey Chaucer is the scribe credited with being the first
to scribble it down.  Chaucer was working at in Middle English and
would have been well versed in communicating in both French and
English. And horizon is one of those words that had made the
transition from French into English, so when Chaucer wrote it down, it
was in an English context.  But horizon then was a little different then than the way we write it now; it had no H at the beginning.

If you know any French speakers at all they often have a hard time
pronouncing the H in words and so although the original Latin word did
indeed have an H on the front of it, after being spoken in France for
centuries before making its way to England, the word had lost its H.
But then during the centuries either side of Shakespeare people in
England started becoming increasingly literate and some kind of
standard spelling began to come into fashion.  This took a long time
and it was sort of an informal consensus thing, not the result of a
single person or spelling book that set the rules.

As an aside, the differences in British and American spelling are
largely due to one guy, Noah Webster who produced spelling books by the
zillion in the decades after the American revolution when those rotten
British spellings represented if not the work of the devil, at least
the work of the enemy.

But back to earlier British English spelling crystallization.  As
people began to think purposefully about how words should be spelled,
instead of the earlier mode of everyone just spelling them however they
saw fit, scholars in Latin and Greek were also thinking about where the
words came from; their etymologies.  In the case of horizon they
deduced that the original parent word had had an H on it and so they
insisted that the Modern English word should have one too.  So the H
was reintroduced.

But in many cases these guys uncovered false etymologies and imposed
supposedly historically correct spellings on words that actually had
never really had that history, and so we now spell them historically
incorrectly.  One example of this is advantage that really shouldn’t have a D in there at all.

As I implied the Latin root of horizon depended on an
earlier Greek root.  Perhaps even more than that English writer and
teacher Mark Pattison, those Greeks knew their geometry and our word horizon evolves out of their understanding.  As with a number of other words we use today, horizon is an abbreviation.  The Greeks would have said horizon kyklos
which means “the boundary circle.”  If you stand in a boat on the open
ocean the geometry of the situation is such that where you see the
water end and the sky begin all around you would look like a perfect
circle from above.  So the boundary circle is the limit of how far you
can see and the root meaning of horizon is “boundary.”

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