Twilight is certainly a wonderful word, bringing to mind the quiet stillness of a fading day, but it doesn’t fully capture the secrets of those hours. There’s a certain quality of light at dusk and dawn, when the sun is still illuminating the atmosphere even though the surface is shrouded in darkness. The twelve hour day comes from the decision of ancient Egyptians to divide the day into ten sunlit hours and two extra twilight hours. Crepuscular rays, which stand out against the unlit air around them, are most easily seen around twilight, when the contrast between light and dark is most obvious. Incidentally, I learned the word ‘vespertine’ (from the Latin vesper=”evening star, evening”) while researching this post and immediately fell in love with it! It feels like the perfect word for all things evening - probably because of its resonance with ‘whispers’.īeyond the world of biology, crepuscular is also used to describe rays of sunlight that stream through gaps in clouds or other obstacles. Crepuscular plants evolved to take advantage of the plentiful pollinators at dusk and dawn vespertine flowers, in particular, are often white but intensely fragrant, like the night-blooming jasmine (called “the scent of night” in Arabic). A crepuscular lifestyle probably helps many animals escape the attention of predators, who are often nocturnal or diurnal an obvious exception is house cats, which are probably responding to higher levels of human activity. Not all crepuscular creatures are active at both dawn and dusk some, like morning glory, are mainly active in the morning (matutinal) and others in the evening (vespertine), like evening primrose. Crepuscular is used to describe the many plants and animals that are active at dusk and dawn, including fireflies (which are actually beetles, not flies), moths, domestic cats, and rabbits. In fact, it comes from the Latin word for twilight, crepusculum. ![]() Ĭrepuscular is actually a very easy word to explain: it’s just an adjective for twilight. In this series, I’d like to take another approach by highlighting scientific words which have escaped the confines of jargon to reach a broader appeal because of their sound or their evocative power as metaphors. Most of the posts on this blog focus on breaching this barrier to the public’s understanding and appreciation of science. ![]() Like many other fields, science has its own style of communication full of specific jargon and guided by unwritten rules.
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