Which came first: Did the TV show take its name from the expression that one is from (or in) the Twilight Zone, or did the expression originate from the TV series?
- Jinx
IIRC it’s a pilot’s term. It applies, I think, to that period of twilight (natch!) that blurs the horizon, sea and sky into a mess. It is a dangerous time if you are flying with limited instruments.
Used first(that I can find) in a speech by William Jennings Bryan in 1908.
“You shall not press down upon the brow of labor this crown of thorns,
you shall not crucify mankind upon a cross of gold” -in the twighlight zone.
I was curious about the context, since Bryan couldn’t have been using it in the pilot’s sense, so I googled it. It was used in a speech at the National Governors Association:
Did the concept of a Twilight Zone on the planet Mercury play any role in the origin or popularization of this phrase?
Between the late Nineteenth Century and 1965, Mercury was believed to be tidally coupled to the Sun, with a period of rotation equal to one revolution. This would mean that one side of the planet always faced the Sun, and the other the night sky. But because of libration, there would be a belt on the margins where the Sun bobbed along the horizon and rose and set.
In the pre-1965 science lit that I read as a kid, both fact and fiction, this belt was always called the Twilight Zone; here is an example from 1950, before the TV show.
But I don’t know when the phrase was coined with respect to Mercury.
I was going to post the same thing. Reading space books from the '50s, I was quite familiar with the term even before the show, and was not familiar with the older usage mentioned here.
I don’t remember noticing any use of the term in Planet Stories like sf from the '30s and '40s, which tended to be much less realistic than that published after the wave of accurate books on space. I should check my Astoundings from the time for stories set on Mercury.
Along these lines, I have since found it also refers to the deepest depth in the ocean that light can reach after which all is blackness.
I have not heard it used in aviation.
My take is that you have Day and Night. In between them, you have a period that is both, and neither. This, I think, is the gist of what Bryant was saying. You can’t hide from the laws of either, because there is no ‘grey area’ – unlike the TV show, where the line between reality and fantasy are blurred.
Caves have three zones: the entrance zone, the twilight zone, and the dark zone. Each has its own ecosystem type. In the twilight zone, there’s not enough light for plants to thrive, but there’s enough light that vision is still an advantage for an organism.
Any idea when that term for that part of the cave was coined?
Interesting - I would have guessed that the term originated with the TV show. In this case, though, the words are common enough, and since the word “twilight” is always about an area of transition, the word “zone” naturally follows. I wonder if Rod Serling got it from anywhere or if he used them together without knowledge of those other places?
After we figure this one out, let’s find the source for “the whole nine yards”!
I found this:
I thought that was already solved (with the help of a doper?)
Sort of memory/association: isn’t there a term “twilight sleep” that is/was used in anesthesiology?
As reported in The Twilight Zone Companion, Rod Serling initially thought he had invented the phrase “twilight zone,” but later learned it was an aviation term. His older brother Robert was an aviation writer; perhaps Serling heard him use the phrase.
The phrase was certainly “in the air” at the time. Raymond Chandler planned to write a novel titled Zone of Twilight; he never wrote it, and died before Serling’s television show premiered.
I would tend to accept Rod’s account, since (like I noted above), if you’re talking about something that’s in twilight, “zone” is a pretty obvious choice.
Here’s the paragraph from The Twilight Zone Companion:
It was surprising to me that the use of the term in books did not go up in 1959. According to Google NGram Viewer, it’s been relatively flat since 1920 with a spike upward during WWII.