For the first time in ages I am about to work for Berlin’s Film Festival, the Berlinale, again. That is the reason I have put this thread in Cafe Society and tagged it “movies”, but if the mods want to move it to Factual Questions or whatever I am fine with that: I guess my question does have a clear answer.
The Berlinale grants several awards, as festivals do, and one happens to be called the Shooting Star Award. The Festival has granted that award for a very long time by now. It is a small peeve of mine, as shooting stars, aka estrellas fugaces in Spanish, are the epitome for something that does not last. The very word fugaz expresses that thought in Spanish: it means ephemeral, short-lived or fleeting. The Germans, though, seem to think that shooting stars shoot up, they see it as a symbol for a meteoric rise, because of the word shooting, I suppose. Most do not know that the right translation into German is Sternschnuppe (I have asked many). So the Berlinale grants this award to a young new actor and actress that appears in a movie shown at the festival. They do not mean to say that their career is going to come crashing down burning. But that is what I hear because of the Spanish in my head.
Now I wonder: Would that be the normal association in English too? Or would you be happy to receive the Shooting Star Award?
Yes, I’d agree that, in (at least American) English, “shooting star” would generally be used to refer to something ephemeral, that shines brightly for a brief time, before fading away to nothing.
The term is directly used as a colloquialism for spotting a meteor as it’s briefly visible in the night sky, and is more broadly used for, as you suspect, to refer to someone or something which is famous/prominent for only a short time, such as an actor who briefly showed promise, and starred in a role or two, before falling into obscurity, and/or meeting a tragic end. An actor like James Dean would be an example.
Based on this context:
…I think that, in English, “Rising Star” would be a far better appellation.
There’s a song by the English rock group Bad Company, “Shooting Star,” which captures this exact idea. In the song, the character “Johnny” becomes a big rock star, but dies suddenly due to a drug-and-alcohol overdose.
The focus on “meteor” and related words to a falling space rock is comparatively recent. The ancient Greek root is μετέωρος (metéōros), meaning “high” or “lofty”. It’s why the study of weather is meteorology: studying the lofty air.
“Meteoric” at its root simply means “elevated”, and you can rise to meteoric heights or fall from them. From our perspective, space rocks mostly do the latter but the idiom really has nothing to do with space rocks.
This etymological blog talks about the origin of “meteoric rise”.
Our common use and understanding of the word has been narrowed by the single most prevalent usage (coming from popular astronomy), so the full meaning is being superceded.
There was a band out of Kansas City in the early 80s called “Shooting Star” that got a lot of airplay from their debut album before fading away into obscurity. I guess they were aptly named.
