The Arabic Words for Moon.

Alena Belova sent me a link to her essay The Word for Beautiful Was the Word for Moon and I thought it was interesting enough to post: Say ya qamar to someone in Arabic — you moon — and, at least in my experience of hearing it, it still lands, even as it starts to sound a little old-fashioned. Not like the moon. The moon. A whole face, a whole person, folded into the roundest, brightest thing in the night. The compliment is worn enough that it can be reached for the way an English speaker says gorgeous — automatically, barely hearing the picture inside the word. There is a full moon rising over the Corniche and a child is being told she is one. The word for moon, of course, is not the word for beautiful. Qamar means moon and only moon; the beauty is something a thousand years of poets loaded onto it. But that loading is the whole story, and it is worth stopping the reflex, because the picture inside the word is stranger than the compliment lets on. We think we know what this metaphor…