You’ve probably heard the time period earlier than, describing somebody in pure bliss: They’re “on cloud 9.” Perhaps rather less typically nowadays, because it seems like everybody’s on variable circles of hell relying on the day, however nonetheless.
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The specification of cloud quantity 9 would counsel that there’s a cloud-based happiness scale in frequent use. The type of factor you’d see on a remedy worksheet or a dry-erase board at a health care provider’s workplace to explain the effectiveness of the opioid they simply administered.
But when there’s such a factor, I’m unaware of it.
One other educated guess of cloud 9’s origins is that since Dante famously popularized the concept of 9 circles of hell in Inferno, a basic that I’m snug sufficient in my intelligence to not fake to have learn, it might monitor that there have been 9 corresponding circles of heaven. In actual fact, he does describe 9 heavens in Paradiso. The ninth being “Primum Cellular,” which is a bit more of a mouthful however, truthfully, nonetheless fairly cool.
Some individuals have accepted this rationalization wholesale, as far as to make it the title of a New Yorker piece on the Divine Comedy, a sentence that as I sort it, makes me really feel like I’m rotating brandy round a snifter in a tenured professor’s examine.
Now, when you’re extra of an Japanese religions individual, you may have your personal model of the afterlife to drag from, and curiously, the levels of enlightenment in some types of Buddhism additionally high out at 9. That is in all probability why lots of people’s psychological picture of cloud 9 is any person sitting cross-legged on a cloud, glowing and making mysterious however meaningless hand gestures.
However neither of those guesses actually take a look at both. That’s as a result of the earliest references to cloud something-or-other consult with cloud seven, which looks like a pure growth of the time period “seventh heaven.” The predominance of “cloud seven” can be backed up by its continued existence in German, a language that by no means felt the necessity to climb two additional, within the phrase auf Wolke sieben schweben. And whereas many translation web sites listing “to be on cloud 9” as a direct translation, the German phrase for seven, sieben, is clearly smack-dab in the midst of it.
With these two bits of knowledge collectively, I feel the concept of seventh heaven morphing into cloud seven, and that seven merely inflating over time, is the most definitely origin story of cloud 9. So far as rendering an official judgment, etymologists nonetheless haven’t agreed upon or remoted the genesis, which, come on guys, isn’t this like your full-time job?
To cowl all bases, one final rationalization supplied for why cloud 9 was chosen is the one which appears the least more likely to me. Some counsel that the “cloud 9” in query was primarily based on cloud classifications of the U.S. Climate Bureau, with cloud sort 9, cumulonimbus, being the most effective of all.
Now, that is patently absurd to me, given its reliance on the frequent, slang-using inhabitants giving even a microscopic rat’s ass about cloud classification tables.
