There was talk about a Rapture up to a couple of weeks ago. We expect it to resume some in about five months, but probably less than this spring.

Among the sardonic comments, the sarcasm, the jokes, I heard occasional wonder about the definition. I’m sure most of the wonderers had ways to look it up on their phones, but as far as I know, they wondered and then wandered into other thoughts. At least one of us likes dictionaries, though, and here’s what I see.

Rapture suggests rhapsody to some of us, but the words are not related. Rapture seems to have been used since around 1600 and came to us through Middle French and Middle Latin from the old Latin raptus (a carrying off).

My sources say the word was originally applied to women and is cognate with rape. Rapture is like rapt, and rapt (around 1350) derived from the Middle English past participle of rapen (again from raptus), which meant to carry off, abduct, rape. The word rapture evolved from violent seizure to the sense of spiritual ecstasy, the carrying of a person to another sphere of existence, around 1629.

The brutality of the original word survives in raptor. Those birds of prey are named for the word that means seizes by force.

If your best friend told you to jump off a bridge, would you do it? I hope not. And just because a word has been used since 1629 doesn’t mean we have to keep using it. We need a better term for translation to a higher plane of awareness. If you please.