Talk:daystar

Requesting help with daystar.

Discussion copied from the Tea Room

I updated daystar a bit--it was a popular idiom in poetry, possibly going back pretty far (see [1]), where it meant "morning star". It's since become a popular bit of hacker/internet slang for "the Sun", usually in the context of "Your star burns!" or the like. I see it in some modern fantasy novels, and I think it means "Sun" there as well--a meaning I don't see in any pre-1900 quotations. (I don't have anything from 1900-1990, which is a pretty sizable gap.) Questions that I've been unable to answer are:

1. Did "daystar" ever mean the sun, as opposed to the morning star, in its classic usage?
2. If not, when (and where) did the use meaning "Sun" originate?
3. Does there exist a good reference for word's use in hacker culture, if the second definition is in fact limited to that doman?

Thanks! grendel|khan 22:20, 27 August 2007 (UTC)

Yeah, daystar has often been used to mean the sun. This is from Milton's Lycidas (1637):

Sunk though he be beneath the watry floar,

So sinks the day-star in the Ocean bed,

And yet anon repairs his drooping head,

And tricks his beams, and with new-spangled Ore,

Flames in the forehead of the morning sky

I'm fairly sure Spenser uses it this way too, although I can't find a reference at present. Widsith 10:43, 29 August 2007 (UTC)

A dual search for "Spencer" and "daystar" truned up nothing on Wikisource, but I did find:

• 1913 Thomas Bulfinch, The Age of Fable, ch 9

  "Ceyx was king of Thessaly, where he reigned in peace, without violence or wrong. He was son of Hesperus, the Day-star, and the glow of his beauty reminded one of his father."

• 1860 George Eliot, The Mill on the Floss, Bk2 ch 2

  But old Christmas smiled as he laid this cruel-seeming spell on the outdoor world, for he meant to light up home with new brightness, to deepen all the richness of indoor color, and give a keener edge of delight to the warm fragrance of food; he meant to prepare a sweet imprisonment that would strengthen the primitive fellowship of kindred, and make the sunshine of familiar human faces as welcome as the hidden day-star.

I also find the following figurative usage:

• 1860 George Eliot, The Mill on the Floss, Bk5 ch 4

  "But suppose, Maggie,–suppose it was a man who was not conceited, who felt he had nothing to be conceited about; who had been marked from childhood for a peculiar kind of suffering, and to whom you were the day-star of his life..."

--EncycloPetey 02:16, 1 September 2007 (UTC)