Today’s word of the day, thanks to the Word Guru at Wordsmith.org, is precipitate, which can be either an adjective, a noun, or a verb. It is interesting that the use of the word in a sentence dictates its pronunciation. As an adjective or a noun, it is pronounced /prɪˈsɪp ɪ tɪt/, where the last syllable rhymes with bit. As a verb, it is pronounced /prɪˈsɪp ɪˌteɪt/, where the last syllable rhymes with late. Two of the three forms have several meanings.

The transitive verb precipitate can mean “to hasten the occurrence of; bring about prematurely, hastily, or suddenly,” “to cast down headlong; fling or hurl down,” “to cast, plunge, or send, especially violently or abruptly,” or in chemistry, “to separate (a substance) in solid form from a solution, as by means of a reagent” (https://www.dictionary.com/browse/precipitate). The intransitive verb precipitate can mean, in meteorology, “to fall to the earth’s surface as a condensed form of water; to rain, snow, hail, drizzle, etc.,” “to separate from a solution as a precipitate,” or “to be cast or thrown down headlong” (ibid.).

The adjective precipitate can mean “headlong (as in ‘a precipitate fall down the stairs’),” “rushing headlong or rapidly onward,” “proceeding rapidly or with great haste,” “exceedingly sudden or abrupt,” or “done or made without sufficient deliberation; overhasty; rash” (ibid.).

The noun precipitate is restricted to chemistry, and it means “a precipitated solid in its suspended form or after settling or filtering” (ibid.).

The verb form appears in English in the “1520s, ‘to hurl or fling down’ (from a precipice or height), a back formation from precipitation or else from Latin praecipitatus, past participle of praecipitare ‘to throw or dive headlong; be hasty,’ from praeceps (genitive praecipitis) ‘steep, headlong, headfirst,’ from prae ‘before, forth’ (see pre-) + caput ‘head’ (from PIE root *kaput- ‘head’).
“Earliest use in English is figurative, ‘to hurl or cause (someone) to fall (into some state or condition).’ Meaning ‘to cause to happen suddenly, hurry the beginning of’ is recorded from 1620s. The chemical sense ‘cause to fall as a sediment to the bottom of a vessel’ is from 1620s (intransitive sense from 1640s). The meteorological sense (intransitive) is attested by 1863” (https://www.etymonline.com/search?q=precipitate).

The adjective form appears in English “c. 1600, ‘hasty, acting without deliberation;’ 1610s, ‘hurled headlong, plunging or rushing down,’ from Latin praecipitatus, past participle of praecipitare ‘to throw or dive headlong,’ from praeceps (genitive praecipitis) ‘steep, headlong, headfirst,’ from prae ‘before, forth’ (see pre-) + caput ‘head’ (from PIE root *kaput– ‘head’). Meaning ‘hasty’ is attested from 1650s” (ibid.).

The noun form appears before the adjective form, in the “1560s, in chemistry, ‘any substance which, having been dissolved in a fluid, falls to the bottom of the vessel on the addition of some other substance producing decomposition of the compound,’ probably a back formation from precipitation. In meteorology, ‘moisture condensed from vapor by cooling and deposited as rain, etc.,’ by 1832” (ibid.), though I do not think that last definition is current.

A couple of things to note: one, that the idea of precipitate is “head before everything” or “head first.” The word preposterous originally meant “before behind,” as in having the cart before the horse, but its meaning has changed in English to just “absurd.”

The second has to do with sound changes. It may seem funny that the cipitate part of the word comes from caput, which (as in decapitation) has the /k/ sound at the beginning instead of the /s/ sound. In classical Latin, cipitate would have begun with /k/, but later in ecclesiastical Latin, the c would have softened into a /tʃ/ (the ch in church) before the vowels i, e, and y; later in French and in English, the softening would have increased, making the sound /s/. Think of city, celery, and cycle (the first c).

Today is the day of a solar eclipse progressing through the United States. For some reason, people think that the mere coincidence of the moon’s path intersecting with the path of the sun for a very small portion of the world may be an event with spiritual and existential significance.

One website (https://kfgo.com/2024/04/05/what-if-its-more-than-just-an-eclipse/) lists a host of reasons that this may be an event that presages the end of the world. For instance, the path of this year’s solar eclipse will cross the path of the last solar eclipse that crossed over the United States in 2017, making an X over the United States. This eclipse occurs on the eve of Nisan 1, the Biblical New Year. Its path takes it over a large number of cities with Biblical names. Its path crosses over an area that will experience a veritable plague of cicadas, which are kind of like locusts. Near the path of totality will appear a comet, Comet 12P/Pons-Brooks, also known as The Devil’s Comet since way back in 2023.

This website also argues that the eclipse’s crossing America at a time of crisis in Israel is evidence of the Biblical implications of the eclipse. Because the United States was part of what was discovered by Columbus, who may have been Jewish and may have been seeking for a new Promised Land (instead of a western route to the Indies), and because America was founded on Biblical principles that included, somehow, preserving Israel, and because America was responsible, in part, for the foundation of the modern Israel in 1948 (ignoring the Balfour Declaration, I suppose), clearly this eclipse is potentially prophetic.

I, clearly, do not agree that this eclipse will signal the end of the world. For one thing, in Acts 10:34-35, Peter tells the people, “I now understand how true it is that God has no favorites, but that in every nation all those who fear God and do what is right are acceptable to him.” In other words, the United States does not have Most Favored Nation status with Heaven. It is not the new Promised Land; it is not the light on the hill. And cicadas are not locusts—they do not strip the land like locusts despite the massive numbers we expect. It is also true that prophets have predicted the end of the world many, many times based on the same kinds of predictors.

There was a total eclipse of the sun in 1878, which you can read about at length in David Baron’s book American Eclipse (Liveright, 2017). In it he tells the story of Ephraim Miller, a Christian farmer and family man, who had read about the coming apocalypse. When the eclipse began, Baron writes, “A devout man, Miller had been heard to say that morning that he had learned the world would end that very evening, and if so, he intended to be ‘so sound asleep that Gabriel’s trumpet wouldn’t wake him.’ He apparently wished to avoid the apocalypse and to speed his passage to the hereafter. He did not plan to go alone. Entering the house, he encountered his son and struck hard with the axe. The boy fell, gasping for life in a pool of blood. Miller’s young daughters—age 2 and 4—wailed and hid beneath the bed, while his littlest child, an infant, crawled on the floor. Clutching a new razor with his right hand, Miller climbed a ladder to the tiny attic. There, closer to the kingdom of heaven, he cut his own throat from ear to ear. Then he fell back to earth beside his dying son.
“Miller’s wife, witnessing the murder-suicide, screamed and burst out the back door. ‘Come on, sweet chariot,’ she cried as she wrung her hands, crossing a cotton field in the deep twilight at the end of time” (https://www.thedailybeast.com/total-eclipses-freak-people-out-and-thats-not-particularly-insane).

The world, of course, did not end on that July day in 1878. So I guess my advice is this: when the eclipse occurs, or whenever an eclipse or other natural phenomenon occurs, take no precipitate action. Such phenomena do not precipitate the end of times.

The image today is of a total eclipse of the sun from Riva Galchen’s article “A Guide to the Total Solar Eclipse” in the New Yorker, April 5, 2024 (https://www.newyorker.com/science/elements/a-guide-to-the-total-solar-eclipse).