Words of the Month - Lipstick of the Spheres?

         What do cosmetics have to do with the cosmos?  They share a Greek root, but took very different paths into modern English.  The Greek kosmos meant “an orderly arrangement,” and the verb form of the same word was used in different senses including arranging troops for battle, establishing governments, and also adorning and arranging women’s dress, hair, and appearance.  It’s easy to see how that last sense got us to our modern cosmetics.

        Meanwhile, the sense of an organized system gave the word kosmos the meaning of  “the universe.”  Pythagorus was credited with being the first to use the word to mean “the starry firmament,” and it was first used in Middle English in about 1200.  However, our modern sense of cosmos as “the universe as a model of order” didn’t really take off in English until the mid 1800s, when it was used in English

translations of Alexander von Humboldt’s masterwork Kosmos.

        Between Pythagorus and Humboldt, meanwhile, the meaning of kosmos was expanding to include Earth in addition to the heavens.  It was then sometimes used in Christian writings to refer to “the inhabited earth” or “the worldly life, as opposed to the afterlife/heaven.”  That shift in meaning tied in with the word cosmopolite, which came from the Latinized Greek for “citizen of the world.”  That word entered English around 1610, but not until about 200 years later do we get the adjective cosmopolitan, meaning “free from local prejudices,” and around 1840 it could also be applied to groups and mean “composed of people from many nations, multi-ethnic.”

        As for the cocktail cosmopolitan, that was apparently invented in the 1970s, but, just like the word cosmos, it took a celebrity to popularize it.  In this case, rather than Pythagorus or Humboldt, we have the television show “Sex and the City” to thank, in the 1990s.  And that, I might argue, brings us back full circle to the connection with adorning and arranging women’s appearance.

[Pictures: Young Woman Applying Rouge, color woodblock by Hishiguchi Goyô, 1920 (Image from Art Institute Chicago);

Cosmogony, woodcut by Victor Delhez, 1926 (Image from Armstrong Fine Art);

In Cafe II, linocut by Marta Wakula-Mac (Image from Saatchi Art).]