In the Before Times, perhaps you had a favorite restaurant where you knew the staff and could watch the cooks preparing meals. You can’t go there right now, of course, but you might order takeout, and enjoy your meal while thinking about the convivial atmosphere and the friendly kitchen crew.
There’s some chance, though, that your delivery meal didn’t come from the restaurant as you imagine it. Instead, the food might have been prepared in a facility whose name I learned just this week: a dark kitchen.
A dark kitchen, also called a ghost kitchen, is a commercial kitchen that’s set up in an industrial space somewhere. There’s no storefront, no dining area, no waitstaff, and of course no customers. When food is all delivery, all the time, restaurants don’t have to use their own kitchens. It can make more economic and operational sense to be working and delivering out of a dark kitchen someplace.
In fact, the dark kitchen might not even be the kitchen for your restaurant as such—your familiar cooks, just working in a different place. The dark kitchen might be run by an independent company that sources the delivery meals for a variety of restaurants. If you order Mexican tonight and teriyaki tomorrow, who knows, perhaps both meals come from the same dark kitchen, and neither was touched by the folks who work at the restaurant you used to visit.
Industrial kitchens have been around a long time; what’s new with dark kitchens is that there’s still a notion that your meal comes from the restaurant whose menu you ordered from. But as with so many other things, what feels real to us is really out there somewhere in the cloud. Which is why another name for a dark kitchen is a cloud kitchen.
For origins today, the word climax. We generally use this term to mean the peak of something: “The point of greatest intensity or force in an ascending series or progression” (AHD) or the culmination of something: “the most important or exciting part of a film, contest, etc., usually happening near the end.” (OED). But etymologically speaking, this definition is “wrong,” which you might find surprising. (I did.)
The origin is a Greek word klimax, which means “ladder,” ultimately from a root that meant “to lean.” The word’s journey to us started when it was used in rhetoric for a device in which a key word in a clause is used in the next clause, forming a kind of chain of increasing intensity. Example: “Suffering breeds character; character breeds faith; in the end faith will not disappoint.” (Jesse Jackson) You can see the ladder-like sense of this rhetorical device.
So originally climax was the process of climbing, not the culmination of the process. Our everyday definition came about “due to popular ignorance and misuse of the learned word,” as the OED noted in 1889. Sorry.
There’s been a similar progression of meaning with the word crescendo. This also refers to a steady increase in intensity, as in music. Crescendo is Italian for “growing,” whose root we also seen in words like accrete, increase, procreate, and in a crescent (i.e., growing or waxing) moon.
But crescendo is also now used to mean the endpoint of this growing, especially in the phrase “reach a crescendo.” People at the intersection of music and language pedantry sometimes object to this usage on etymological grounds, but as Jem Butterfield explains in a blog post, the use of crescendo to mean “peak” is well established. As is, of course, climax to mean the same thing.
As a point of interest, apparently climax to mean “orgasm” (originally sexual climax) was introduced in the 1870s. Douglas Harper says climax in this sense was popularized since about 1900 as “a more accessible word than orgasm.” There are of course other words as well.
Back to that comment that the way we use climax today is “wrong” for etymological reasons. I hope you caught those scare quotes, because this isn’t true. Insisting that a word’s “real” meaning is based exclusively on its origins is referred to as the etymological fallacy. Etymology is not destiny.
Like this? Read all the Friday words.