R*pture

For absolutely no good reason at all, I was thinking about the similarity between two words: rapture and rupture. The connection is obtuse at best; the Happy Tutor had been going rapture happy and I had been reading an interview with Bruno Latour that argued that the great rupture with history proclaimed by modernism never occurred. Of course, it seems pertinent to point out that there hasn’t been much rapture either.

Standing in the shower, I started playing with the vowels. There is very little difference in vocal position between æ and ε. I don’t know why it made me inordinately happy to realize that the shift was directly equivalent to the change brought on by the great vowel shift in English. So then, the progression from rapture to rupture is phonetically understandable.

However, exactly why it would seem normal to travel from a happy word to a sad one is still a bit beyond my grasp. Ruptures hurt.