This past weekend Emily asked when the fireworks would start and she was told, “after dark.” That seemed to satisfy her, but I’ve alway been curious about the phrase. When we say “after dark,” we really mean “after light” — when the daylight has faded and it’s becoming night.
Well, my extensive research, while not completely satisfying, did shed some “light” on the subject. The real meaning of “after dark” is “after dark comes” or “after darkness falls.” It was never meant to mean “after dark is over.”
If you look up dark in the dictionary, among the definitions of the noun dark is nightfall. So “after dark” could mean “after nightfall.”
The term has been around since at least the 1700s, and can be found in many literary works throughout the years. Gilbert & Sullivan used the term in one of their operas in 1882 — Lolanthe (The Peer and the Perl) about a fairy (Lolanthe) being banished from fairyland, in the following lyrics:
I heard the minx remark,
She’d meet him after dark,
Inside St. James’s Park,
And give him one!
The term has been around for a long time, and it’s obviously not technically correct, but no one — even kids — have any trouble interpreting its meaning correctly. Besides, it just sounds better than “after light.”
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