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(No Greek origins, for a change.) The Romans had a word prōcrāstināre that meant the same as the word we use today: “to put off till the next day, to defer, delay” (OED). It looks Latiny-Greeky (that pro- prefix), but beyond that, nothing really stands out as a familiar root. In season 1, episode 9, Ted and his boss get into a discussion about the origins of the word procrastinate. If you say this out loud, you’ll see how the the words that follow the anacruses are where the stress begins in each line.įor origins this week, I was put onto a word history from an unexpected source: the show Ted Lasso on Apple TV. Someone whose YouTube handle is TheStereotypicalScot uses this example (video) of anacruses (underlined) in a well-known verse: There’s a great example at the beginning of the song “Happy Birthday to You.” The word “happy” is an anacrusis before you get to “birthday,” which is the first downbeat in the song.Īnother example that they note in Wikipedia is the song “Yellow Submarine” by the Beatles: “ In the TOWN where I was BORN …”, where “in the” is an anacrusis.Īnacrusis is a technical term in music, but it’s also used for poetry. Or to cite a truly remarkable description of anacrusis from Wikipedia, “The grouping of one or more antecedent tone events to a perceived phrase gestalt may be rhythmically evoked by their temporal proximity to the phrase’s first downbeat (perceived phrase onset).”ĭictionaries that I consulted say that anacrusis is a synonym for upbeat.

In music, the word anacrusis refers to one or more unstressed notes that are played (or sung) before the downbeat at the beginning of a song or phrase. When I looked it up, though, I realized that I knew the concept quite well by another name.īecky is a singer, which might help set the stage, so to speak. Not long ago, friend Becky asked whether I knew the term anacrusis.