When I was little, before I could fully read, we were learning about the lyrics to the Star Spangled Banner. When being read the lyrics I came across a word I didn’t know— well it wasn’t really a word I didn’t know. You see what happened was I misheard my teacher, she said “dawn’s early light” I heard “dawnserly light.” One word.
I didn’t have a handle of english but I thought because of the “-ly” suffix it was one big describing word so I asked what it meant. However she didn’t know what I meant, she ended up explaining what dawn was (I already knew that 🙄 I wasn’t a fool). She got more confused, thinking I meant what the lyrics were trying to say emotionally
She described the wave of relief as the sun crested over the landscape. The feeling of relaxing your shoulders because even so it’s not over the worst part has passed.
I loved the fictional word ‘dawnserly’. It was the moment in The Lord of the Rings when the ring is destroyed but they are still so far from home. They are still physically in pain but they are no longer in mortal peril
The reason I mentioned this all is because our friend Johnathan Harker explains it perfectly on June 25
I thought the word came from the emotion in the moment when the actual dawn broke through the darkness of night but was now used to describe that feeling in other situations
