Quick word of the week today, and musical, since I just finished writing A Song Unheard. 😉
In today’s vernacular, upbeat means “with a positive mood”–but this is a rather modern connotation, only dating back to about 1947. It’s thought to have come from the phrase on the upbeat, which meant “improving, getting better.”
This does indeed come from the musical idea that a conductor’s baton is raised during a given beat in a measure (the denotation which is also rather modern, dating only to 1869)–however this beat in a measure isn’t particularly positive by nature or anything. It gained a “happy” connotation simply because it sounded optimistic. My kind of reasoning, LOL.
Roseanna M. White is a bestselling, Christy Award winning author who has long claimed that words are the air she breathes. When not writing fiction, she’s homeschooling her two kids, editing, designing book covers, and pretending her house will clean itself. Roseanna is the author of a slew of historical novels that span several continents and thousands of years. Spies and war and mayhem always seem to find their way into her books…to offset her real life, which is blessedly ordinary.