Cosmos

Cosmos means the universe — the world taken as one ordered whole. Yet the Greek kosmos at its root originally meant not the sky but "order, orderly arrangement, ornament." Set between the last days of September, when cosmos flowers line the roads, and 4 October, when World Space Week begins, the flower and the universe share a name for exactly this reason: order. The Online Etymology Dictionary records that cosmos entered English around 1200 meaning "the universe, the world," as a Latinized form of Greek kosmos "order, good order, orderly arrangement"; that the verb kosmein meant generally "to dispose, prepare," but especially "to order and arrange troops for battle, to set an army in array," and also "to deck, adorn, equip, dress"; and that the noun carried a secondary sense, "ornaments of a woman's dress, decoration," alongside "the universe, the world." The oldest witnesses are Homeric. In the Iliad, when Thersites rails at the kings, he is said to speak "not according to order" (οὐ κατὰ κόσμον, 2.214); of an ivory cheek-piece for a horse the poet says it is "an ornament (κόσμος) for the horse and a glory for its driver" (4.145). The battle line, a woman's finery, a horse's trapping — all were kosmos. The sky became kosmos later, and the Greeks credited the naming to a particular figure. Diogenes Laertius, in the life of Pythagoras in Book 8 of the Lives of Eminent Philosophers, in a passage that follows his citation of Favorinus, records that Pythagoras "was the first to call the heaven kosmos and the earth round" (τὸν οὐρανὸν πρῶτον ὀνομάσαι κόσμον καὶ τὴν γῆν στρογγύλην), adding that Theophrastus gave the credit to Parmenides and Zeno to Hesiod (8.48). A third-century writer on a figure of the sixth century BCE, in a text that itself records rival claims: this is a tradition, not a fact. But what the tradition meant to say is plain. To call the heaven kosmos was to say that the heaven was an arrangement — that it was order. Plato took the sense as given. In the Gorgias Socrates says that "the wise tell us that heaven and earth, gods and men, are held together by community and friendship, by orderliness, temperance and justice, and for this reason, my friend, they call this whole a kosmos, not a disorder (akosmia) or licence" (507e–508a). The Romans, rather than borrowing the word outright, rendered it in their own. Pliny, near the opening of Book 2 of the Natural History, writes: "for the Greeks called it by a name meaning ornament, and we too, from its perfect and flawless elegance, call it mundus" (namque et Graeci nomine ornamenti appellavere eum et nos a perfecta absolutaque elegantia mundum, 2.8). Latin mundus, too, was both "the world" and "clean, neat," and mundus muliebris was "a woman's toilet." Two languages show the same overlap in the same place. English cosmos appears from about 1200 but long remained rare. The dictionary records that it did not become popular until 1848, when translations of Alexander von Humboldt's Kosmos (volume 1, 1845) took it as the English equivalent of the German title. Humboldt's title meant to draw the whole of nature, from the earth to the stars, as a single order, and that intention brought the English word back to life. Then, on 28 September 1980, Carl Sagan's television series Cosmos: A Personal Voyage was first broadcast, and the book of the same title appeared the same year. Its opening sentence — "The Cosmos is all that is or ever was or ever will be" — put the word back into a generation's mouth. Today the word lives in two places. One is the sky. World Space Week, declared by the United Nations in 1999, runs each year from 4 October (the launch of Sputnik in 1957) to 10 October (the entry into force of the Outer Space Treaty in 1967), and cosmonaut, which came through Russian, and cosmology both carry this kosmos. The other is the roadside. From late September into early October, the cosmos that bloom along riverside paths and at cosmos festivals take their name from 1791, when the Spanish botanist Antonio José Cavanilles, in his Icones et Descriptiones Plantarum, gave the genus name Cosmos to this flower of Mexican origin and described Cosmos bipinnatus. The usual explanation is that its eight evenly set petals suited a name meaning "order"; whether Cavanilles himself explained it so could not be confirmed for this piece, and it is set down as the received account. The Encyclopedia of Korean Culture glosses the name instead as "meaning that one adorns with this plant," reading it from the ornamental side of the Greek word. In Korea the cosmos is a naturalised plant of the modern era (the exact date of its introduction is not known), and the flower language "a girl's pure heart" is likewise a widely repeated tradition. The cosmos of the sky and the cosmos of the roadside, two and a half thousand years apart, share one word: orderliness.