Transcript of “”Meteoric Rise” Is About Speed and Duration, Not Direction”
Hello, you have A Way with Words.
Hi, my name’s Dave. I live in Northern Virginia and close to Washington, D.C.
And I had a question about a couple of words that seem a little bit contradictory.
So let me just give a little bit of background.
I’m a copy editor for a thick tank in Washington, right?
So we write a lot about numbers and trends and data over time.
So there’s only so many ways that you can write about this stuff. So we’re writing about increases and decreases. So one of the things that I started seeing come up in our writing is this term meteoric rise. So it’s like the word meteor with IC on the end, so meteoric rise.
And the first time I saw that, I thought, okay, no big deal. There’s nothing really weird about that. But I realized that, okay, so those of us who are earthbound, we think about a meteor as falling from the sky, right? So how could that be used to describe a rise?
And then I realized there’s another one that I came across that’s similar to this, which is a precipitous increase.
So it’s got the, you know, it sounds like the same root as precipitation, but it’s a precipitous increase.
And again, it’s kind of like rain, unless it’s raining horizontally, right?
Rain is going downward.
So how could an increase be precipitous?
So, yeah, I was just curious, kind of like, what’s the history of these terms?
And it looks like they became a lot more popular, you know, early in the 20th century, but especially took off maybe around the 80s.
Tell us about the think tank. Are you talking about rain and meteors in the papers that you’re copy editing?
No, not at all. It’s actually, you know, it’s demographic data, it’s public opinion.
So it’s kind of like, you know, so political favorability, things like that.
So things that are, and we do a lot of data visualization.
So if you look at the page, you can actually see increases and decreases,
And you can see when things are going sharply up or sharply down.
Let’s take those in reverse order.
So precipitous is really interesting here because the notion that is coming with that word,
Those connotations, their steepness and an acute angle.
So what you’re talking about with precipitous isn’t rain falling or something coming from the sky.
You’re talking about the angle of the rain, I guess you would say, straight up and down or close to it.
So you can’t have a precipitous rise because it’s steep like a precipice.
I see. Precipice. Okay, that makes a little more sense.
Yeah, so that’s where we’re getting that.
Now, meteoric rise is a little more complicated because we can’t forget that meteoric is an adjective here.
And so it’s modifying rise.
And you have to have rise because a meteoric on its own, as you noted, doesn’t mean go tall, go up, go high.
What it means is to move fast and bright for a short amount of time.
So that’s what’s happening with meteoric.
Meteoric does not contain a notion of going up.
It just is about the speed and the brightness and the duration.
So that’s why you need rise at the end of it to indicate the upward trajectory of whatever it is you’re talking about, the line on your graph, so to speak.
Okay, interesting.
Yeah, you don’t really hear about a meteoric fall, do you?
You do, actually.
It’s usually a meteoric rise, do you?
Yeah, if you look at the corpora, these large bodies of text that linguists and lexicographers analyze to see what’s really happening in language in the aggregate,
It, you will see meteoric talking about all kinds of movements up and down, sometimes even sideways.
And meteoric often appears on its own or as a post-nominal adjective that is coming after a noun.
So meteoric doesn’t only describe rise. Yeah, it’s doing some really interesting stuff. So
As Martha knows, Greek is the origin here. Meteor is from a word meaning thing in the air.
And so if we just think about the meteoric item being up, you know, it doesn’t have to move up.
It doesn’t have to have a trajectory of up.
It’s just up.
So, again, we’re talking about brightness, duration, and the swiftness.
Those are the three things that are happening with the meteor.
Dave, I bet you run into a lot of semantic satiation as a copier.
You know, where you just stare at a word for so long and you just think, oh, is that right?
Is that spelled right?
I can’t remember.
I do. It’s kind of the curse of micro editing. You know, it’s sort of like, you know, if you stare at words for too long, sometimes they will stick in your head and you start overthinking like, does that really make sense? And we just don’t want our readers to be looking at this and scratching their heads and saying, hey, that’s weird.
Right. That is the definition of a good copy editor. You want stuff to pass unnoticed, but still deliver its message and meaning.
Well, thank you, David, for your call. Good luck out there in the copy editing trenches.
All right. Thank you so much. Bye.
We do love those moments that you share with us about when you’re at work and a language thing strikes you.
It’s like, oh, no, am I doing this right?
Well, we can talk about it and figure it out together.
