by Kevin Burton
Today we continue a look at words and phrases about the middle from the Merriam Webster dictionary.
We start with two phrases about being forced into difficult decisions:
Devil and the deep blue sea
Many phrases that evoke in-between-ness also situate the speaker between two undesirable end points, like the devil and the deep blue sea.
Ocean lovers may object to that characterization of the deep blue sea, but this is a later change to the original phrase, which was the devil and the dead sea. Why the devil, and why the dead sea? No one knows. The phrase first shows up in a 1621 English translation of a collection of Latin and Greek proverbs compiled by Erasmus. It’s the translation of the medieval Latin proverb a fronte praecipitium, a tergo lupi—which has nothing to do with the devil or the sea. A better translation of the Latin would be “a precipice in front, wolves behind.”
Scylla and Charybdis
Between the devil and the deep blue sea has an echo in the phrase between Scylla and Charybdis. The latter phrase also refers to being stuck between two undesirable (and dangerous) options. The phrase appears with this meaning in the mid-1500s.
It draws from Greek mythology. In Homer’s Odyssey and Ovid’s Metamorphoses, Scylla is an immortal monster with six heads, each on a long neck, and twelve feet, who lives in a cave near a narrow strait and feasts on those who are unfortunate enough to sail by. Odysseus encountered her in the Odyssey as he sailed through a narrow strait; she ate six of his men.
On the other side of the strait was Charybdis, another immortal monster. According to Homer, she lived under a fig tree near the shore and swallowed the sea three times a day, thereby creating a dangerous whirlpool with shifting currents. A shipwrecked Odysseus escaped her by clinging to a tree and waiting for her to spit back out an improvised raft. The pairing of Scylla and Charybdis in mythology gave later English speakers an easy shorthand to refer to being stuck in the middle of a dangerous or difficult situation.
Eventually, Scylla and Charybdis were associated with the Strait of Messina: a narrow channel between Sicily and Italy known for its rocky coastline and dangerous currents. A prominent outcropping on the Italian mainland is known as the Rock of Scylla, and some navigators throughout history have noted that the currents in the strait do form a whirlpool on the Sicilian coastline opposite Scylla.
Interstice
Sometimes the in-between isn’t about what’s there; it’s about what’s not. Interstice is a technical word that came into written use in the 1400s, and our earliest evidence of it refers to studying “the interstice of sterres [stars].” In case we aren’t sure what interstice refers to here, the translator helpfully glosses it for us as “the space bytwene.”
Interstice went from macro to micro in use: in the 1600s, we have evidence of interstice used to refer to “the place between the browes, the very seat of reason”; in the 1700s, we read about the “interstices of water,” which are “always found full of air”; and in the 1930s, interstice was applied to the nonmetal atoms or ions that were situated in the spaces of a nonmetal crystalline lattice. In current use, interstice is used to refer to a small space between things, and it appears quite often in the plural (interstices). It’s common in the sciences.
Liminal
Not all in-betweens are static. Liminal is a word that, in its most common extended sense, refers to a state, place, or condition of transition: the liminal state between waking and sleeping, or between life and death.
When liminal first appeared in written use, it had a very specific meaning that referred to something (such as a physical stimulus) which was just barely perceptible, or just barely capable of eliciting a response. This meaning is still in use today in constructions like “liminal auditory stimuli.” The word is the adjectival offspring of the noun limen, which refers to the point at which a physiological or psychological effect begins to be produced, and was borrowed wholesale from Latin, where it means “threshold.”
While liminal appears primarily in formal or academic writing and may be unfamiliar to many, limen is also the root word of the more common subliminal (“below the threshold of perception”).
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