to flash

A flash is not the husband of the whale: here is a small certainty in the sea of words that surround the flash, and which suggest, in addition to the speed, the brightness. Curious connections can be traced with what we can also call lightning: rainbow, flash, gleam, and she too, the whale. The name of this animal in Latin was very generic, and has gradually been more and more limited to the large mammal we know, but originally it also indicated dolphins, seals and other cetaceans. Just the kind of animals that appear unpredictably in the middle of the sea, like lightning flashes in the sky. Medieval bestiaries attributed powerful symbolisms to whales, positive and negative, but they should not be dismissed hastily as pre-Enlightenment naïveté, without first observing current events: see the timeless maritime whale-watching excursions. Not all etymological dictionaries agree in granting whale and whale a real lexical bond; this remains a hypothesis, in fact. The two natural phenomena return to the reality from which they come and disappear from view, perhaps leaving some new questions open.


Fabio Arduini
NP December 2022