During a full solar eclipse you can see the sun’s glowing outer atmosphere, called the corona. In Latin, the term corona means “crown” or “garland.” It’s the source of coronation, as well as the coronary arteries that wreathe the human heart, and coroner, originally an officer of the Crown. Another eclipse-related term, penumbra, comes from Latin for “almost shadow,” and refers to the shadow cast by the earth or moon over an area where a partial eclipse is visible. A related word, umbrage, means “a sense of offense” or “resentment.” This is part of a complete episode.
Transcript of “Sun-Related Words and Their Relations”
You’re listening to A Way with Words, the show about language and how we use it.
I’m Grant Barrett.
And I’m Martha Barnette.
Anytime you’re talking about a total solar eclipse, there’s all this great language that gets repeated.
And one of my favorite words associated with an eclipse is the word corona.
Corona and not the beer, but related to the word for the beer.
Well, yes.
Crown, right?
It comes from the Latin word corona, which means crown.
And the corona is the sun’s upper atmosphere, which you see only when the moon completely blocks out the rest of the sun.
In a full eclipse.
Yeah.
And you can learn new things about the sun that you can’t really tell otherwise because it’s not as bright.
Exactly.
Interesting.
But what’s cool about the word corona, it actually gives us the word crown, which comes from the Latin.
It’s also related to the word coronation then.
Okay.
That makes sense.
You put the crown on the king or queen’s head.
Yeah.
And you mentioned corona beer.
If you look at a bottle of Corona beer, it’s got a crown on it.
And the other Corona in our language is coronary arteries.
Because the coronary arteries sort of wreath around the heart.
And the early crowns, of course, were like wreaths, you know.
So it’s like a wreath of arteries around the heart.
And in fact, the word coroner is also related to the word Corona.
No, no, no.
No, the word coroner also goes back to the word Corona.
Because originally a coroner was an officer of the crown.
Oh, interesting.
And a coroner had all these different duties,
But over time those duties narrowed to just dealing with dead bodies.
Interesting.
And in my mind now I’m singing the Simon and Garfunkel song,
Rosie, the Queen of Corona.
Right?
Queen of Corona.
Yep.
All the way back to Latin.
Interesting.
That’s outstanding.
I thought you were going to go and talk about penumbras and stuff
And throw a lot of shade.
Well, penumbra means literally, from Latin words,
It means almost shadow.
Because it’s not complete, right?
Umbra shows up in the word umbrella.
Right.
And the pen is like in the word peninsula,
Which is an almost island, like Florida is an almost island.
Nice.
Yeah.
I heard what you were doing there, making a joke about throwing shade.
And literally when you’re talking about taking umbrage at something,
It’s like you’re offended by the shade that somebody is throwing.
That’s outstanding.
You know, there might be something to this Latin thing.
We should look into that.
Yeah, maybe people should study Latin.
It’s weird how often that comes up when we talk about word origins.
I know.
And Greek, too.
Like the word eclipse, for example, comes from Greek words that literally mean an abandonment, a falling away.
I mean, can you imagine how traumatic that would have been?
If you didn’t know it was coming, right?
Back in the day.
Yeah.
And you didn’t know it was going to be over.
Right.
Abandonment.
That’s crazy.
Well, as you can hear, we talk about word histories all the time on the show.
Language is complicated and interesting and thoroughly connected to the history of the human race.
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