Outer space, used with its modern meaning, appears as early as the 1840s in a poem by Emmeline Stuart-Wortley. Soon after, Alexander von Humboldt was using variations on it in his writings about the cosmos. By 1901, H.G. Wells was using outer space in fiction, and within a few decades it had become the default term. We can’t talk clearly about the outer space of a building because that sense collides with the term’s other meaning. This is part of a complete episode.
Transcript of “Why Is Beyond the Atmosphere Outer Space?”
Hi there, you have A Way with Words.
Hi, how are you?
I’m doing well.
Who is this and where are you?
My name is Alison and I’m calling from Madison, Wisconsin.
Hey Alison.
What’s going on up there?
So I was swimming laps the other day at the YNCA near to my house and I looked up at a sign on a door and it said that the outside space was reserved for programming.
And I thought to myself, like, outside space, that sounds kind of awkward.
Why don’t they just say outer space?
And then I kind of laughed because like outer space seemed ridiculous.
And then I had questions about like why does outer space why does it sound so ridiculous?
Like what why don’t we use the word outer to describe things anymore.
Okay.
So so you’re talking about first of one of the things you’re talking about is a linguistic collision of where we have these two terms.
We we can’t talk about the outer space of a building because that makes it sounds like it’s it’s circling the planet.
Right.
Yeah.
Right.
It sounded it sounded very odd.
Yeah, and so that is a thing.
It’s actually a thing the oddness that you felt there as a native speaker of English is exactly what happens when two words try to occupy the same space and it’s just clear that we’re going to need to say something else.
This is why you would use the word outside to talk about the space outside a building rather than outer because it’s just just the way it’s gonna go because you know in your heart that it’s clearer that way.
So am I hearing you trying to get at the really why we talk about outer space at all.
What does that outer mean and why is that happening?
Well and I was I was also like wondering like is that a is outer space a technical term?
It seems like when I read things about like like science-based things they, use space.
They don’t use the word outer space.
And so I was wondering like w I guess sort of what the difference is between space and outer space.
I think while for example in the recent Artemis II mission we we had much discussion of space and maybe people talked about outer space.
I think what they tend to do is prefer to talk about altitude and how far you are from a certain part of the planet or other things in space because you always need a point of reference in space.
And often Earth is that point of reference or the International Space Station or the Moon or what have you.
So they outer space isn’t necessarily a term that you’re they’re going to use except in a casual way.
But that outer is really interesting.
And it comes up in a poem in 1841 or 1842 by a woman named Emmeline Stewart Wortley.
And the poem isn’t that great, so I’m not gonna repeat it here.
But she uses outer space and because it’s poetry, it is not even clear to me that she’s actually talking about, you know, way up high outside the atmosphere where there’s nothing but a vacuum and whatever space debris happens to be there.
But other people who’ve studied the stuff insist that’s what she’s talking about.
She’s talking about actual outer spaces of note today.
But but not long after, by the mid eighteen forties, you could get famous people like Humboldt who did all this exploring and stuff and wrote in German and English and used variations on the term talking about outer space and he talks about in relation to the cosmos and the the remoter regions of universal space and the bodies belonging to the outer world and and all these he’s just talking outer meaning away from earth so it’s outer just far from us we are we’re very self-centered as humans.
Think We of earth is everything and everything else is in relationship to it.
So the outer is only really talking about how far we are away from the planet.
I see.
So everything away from us is outer.
Okay.
See I was thinking that maybe outer space is more of like a science fiction term.
Well, it it does turn into science fiction, definitely by H.
G.
Wells, who wrote a in very in 1901.
H.
G.
Wells had it in in one of the books talking about a character going into outer space.
So by that time, not I mean, sixty years it’s not that long in linguistic terms.
Sixty years later, you could just use it in science fiction and people would know what you meant.
It kind of caught on rather quickly.
Well Alison, thanks so much for the question.
Yeah.
Thank you for taking my call.
It was great to talk to you.
Yeah.
Great time.
Take care.
Call us again sometime.
Bye-bye.
Thank you.
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