In celebration of all things sunny, Parking Suns now features every Sunday a different YouTube music clip about the sun!
This week’s entry: “The Twilight Zone,” by the Manhattan Transfer.
Why?
Explanation below!
Why “The Twilight Zone”?
This week in the Northern Hemisphere we had the summer solstice, when the Earth’s North Pole is most tilted toward the Sun. The day was long, and so was the twilight, which is the time after the sun sets when the sky is still light. (Or, at dawn, the time that the sky is light before the sun peeks above the horizon.)
On June 20 in New York City, the sun rose at 5:25 a.m. and set at 8:31 p.m., giving us 15 hours and 6 minutes of direct sunshine. (In contrast, on the winter solstice, in late December, the sun rises at 7:17 a.m. and sets at 4:32 p.m., giving only 9 hours and 15 minutes of sunshine.)
Not only does sunlight last longer in June, so does the twilight. You get about two hours of twilight before the sun rises and another two hours after it sets, which is pretty nifty, in my book. In contrast, December’s twilight lasts only about 1 hour and 40 minutes. Cue the sad trombones!
(I’m talking about civil twilight + nautical twilight + astronomical twilight combined. Check Wikipedia if you want to learn more about this, and to see how these three kinds of twilight break down. For the exact hours of sunrise, sunset, and the various twilights in New York City, click here. This site has a cool graph which you can adjust with your cursor to show the changing hours of sunset, sunrise, and twilight for an entire year.)
But there’s more!
What’s so special about the word “twilight”?
Ever wonder why the number 2 is spelled “two”? It’s one of written English’s many oddities. Why don’t we change it to “tu” to make it easier for children and ESL students when they learn to read?
Yet it’s not so odd. Historically there’s a reason why it’s spelled “two,” and because of this spelling it connects the number “two” with about a dozen other words, all of which have “tw” in them and concern some aspect of doubleness.
“Two” wit:
- twelve: an old compound word of meaning “two left over” (that is, “two more than ten”)
- twenty: two groups of ten
- twain: two. “Never the twain will meet.” [See footnote below for the origin of Mark Twain’s name.]
- between: located in the middle of two things
- twice: doing something two times
- twig: where a branch forks off into two
- twilight: the half light between day and night
- twill: originally a cloth woven of double threads in parallel diagonal lines
- twin: two kids born at the same time
- Tweedle-dum and Tweedle-dee: the world’s most famous twins
- twine: originally a strong thread made of two threads twisted together
- twist: originally to spin two or more strands of yarn into a single thread
- twinkle: flashing on and off
So double your pleasure and play the song twice. You’ll notice that the sun sets two times in the video, too!
Meanwhile, click here for previous Sunny Sundays vids!
Enjoy your week!
Footnote:
Here, courtesy of Wikipedia, is how author Samuel Clemens (who wrote The Adventures of Huckleberry Finn) came up with his nom de plume, “Mark Twain”:
[Clemens] maintained that his pen name came from his years working on Mississippi riverboats, where two fathoms, a depth indicating safe water for passage of boat, was measured on the sounding line. Twain is an archaic term for “two,” as in “The veil of the temple was rent in twain.” The riverboatman’s cry was “mark twain” or, more fully, “by the mark twain”, meaning “according to the mark [on the line], [the depth is] two [fathoms]”, that is, “The water is 12 feet (3.7 m) deep and it is safe to pass.”
