Word Nerd Wednesday – Out of the Blue

Welcome, word nerds! Word Nerd Wednesday is back after a two-week hiatus due to sheer busyness! This week’s phrase comes to you from my eldest daughter, who loves these posts (and proof reads them before I post them!) She heard me use the phrase ‘out of the blue’ earlier this week and immediately said, “That’s a great idea for a Word Nerd Wednesday post!” Well, I couldn’t say no to that!
I had a pretty fair idea of what blue referred to before I looked this one up, and I was right; blue refers to the sky. But why do we say it, and what does it mean?
Most people would know that the expression is used to refer to something completely unexpected, but many of us may not realize that the full expression was originally ‘like a bolt out of the blue’. And now the picture becomes a little clearer, doesn’t it? Because who wouldn’t be completely surprised by a lightning bolt coming from a clear blue sky?
The earliest noted use of this phrase in English is by Thomas Carlyle in The French Revolution (1837): “Arrestment, sudden really as a bolt out of the Blue, has hit strange victims.” However, it is very possible that his inspiration for this imagery goes all the way back to the Roman poet Horace, who would have been known to any well-educated man in the early 1800s. In this translation of his Ode 34 from Perseus Digital Library, the Latin is rendered as follows:

For lo! the sire of heaven on high,
By whose fierce bolts the clouds are riven,
Today through an unclouded sky
His thundering steeds and car has driven.
E’en now dull earth and wandering floods,
And Atlas’ limitary range,
And Styx, and Taenarus’ dark abodes
Are reeling. He can lowliest change
And loftiest; bring the mighty down
And lift the weak; with whirring flight
Comes Fortune, plucks the monarch’s crown,
And decks therewith some meaner wight.

The poem speaks of the god Jove, who was often envisioned as driving his horse-drawn chariot through the clouds and hurling his thunderbolts at whim. He was normally associated with atmospheric phenomenon such as storm clouds and thunder, but in this poem, the poet makes reference to him appearing in an unclouded sky, making his actions all the more surprising: For lo! the sire of heaven on high / By whose fierce bolts the clouds are riven / Today through an unclouded sky / His thundering steeds and car has driven. 
But the poem doesn’t just refer to the unexpectedness of Jove’s actions; it also refers to the capricious reversal of fortunes: …He can lowliest change / And loftiest; bring the mighty down / And lift the weak; with whirring flight / Comes Fortune, plucks the monarch’s crown / and decks therewith some meaner wight.
There is no doubt in my mind that this imagery of plucking the monarch’s crown and placing it on a ‘meaner wight’ (less important person) was also in Thomas Carlyle’s mind when he made this allusion to a bolt out of the blue. That idea of sudden reversal of fortune pretty much describes the French Revolution perfectly! And although the phrase doesn’t necessarily carry that fuller allusion today, I think I’ll have a very different understanding of the phrase next time I say out of the blue.
And just like that, a simply investigation into a common idiom has unearthed a wonderfully rich allusion to classical literature! Bet you didn’t see that coming! 😉

Have you used the phrase ‘out of the blue’ before? What’s something that happened to you ‘out of the blue’?