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 ), 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)