Why do people refer to a “meteoric rise”? Meteors fall. (Actually, meteoroids fall.)
“Meteor” as a latin root is the same place we get “Meteorology” from. It basically referred to anything in the heavens. Some of which rose rapidly. The current usage meaning “space rock” came much later.
Meteors move quickly across the sky (people talked about meteors before they knew what they really were, and only knew how they appeared). So when someone’s rise is very quick, it’s meteoric.
Bkus Stoopid
For the same reason why you fall head over heels in love, you can’t have you cake and eat it it, too, and why that song ain’t so very far from wrong.
English idioms aren’t logical. They usually were coined by a fanciful imagination and people didn’t think being non-literal was any big deal.
Except in the present case, it is in fact pretty logical.
Because meteors move through the sky so quickly, we often refer to something moving very fast as meteoric . A newly-popular singer might be said to experience a meteoric rise to the top. (The fall can be meteoric , too.)
See for example this aircraft which (one would hope) is not famous for falling from the sky:
When they enter the atmosphere, they put on a spectacular show, thus the moniker, “shooting stars”. It also happens very rapidly. So a “meteoric rise” is rapid and spectacular in nature.
When googling “meteoric fall” I cannot find a single hit for this used a metaphor, only used literally for meteors.
But the argument was that it wasn’t and was based upon the assumption that they had to be. You’re pointing out that it is logical, but that doesn’t change the fact that the base assumption is wrong.
I brought this question up some years ago, and some folks pointed out that many of the meteors we see in meteor showers are passing through our atmosphere without actually falling to earth at all. If a meteor is just passing through, it’s neither rising nor falling, because there’s no up or down in space.
Science can be so un-poetic, sometimes.
But “meteoric rise and fall” gets sqillions of hits…