Morrow

We are all familiar with tomorrow. It is a time—and possibly a place—that doesn’t really exist: an imaginary container for the things we don’t want to deal with today. It is deferred obligation (“I’ll pay that bill tomorrow”) or promised reward (“Tomorrow is payday!”).

Morrow is its quieter ancestor.

It is the modern evolution, streamlined in the name of efficiency, of the morrow—which is specific, as indicated by the definite article, yet somehow lands more softly and without expectation. It doesn’t demand action. It simply waits, sitting just out of reach, only to slip away again when we wake.

Literally translated, morrow means “the following day,” but in its original usage there was a vagueness to it that allowed it to gesture toward the near future rather than merely the next day. He has taken no consideration of the morrow. How very clever of it to stretch itself like that. Such a tidy-sounding little word—polite, even—but a bit naughty all the same.

Before morrow, there was morwe, its Middle English form. Before that, in Old English, morgen. As the word was shifting toward morrow, it also carried the meaning of morn—morning—and from this overlap the greeting good morrow was born. Eventually, morning insisted on being its own thing, while morrow continued pointing forward, like a traffic cop waving us down a narrow side street leading somewhere undefined.

Morrow reached its peak in the early nineteenth century, then began a long, steady retreat. By the late twentieth century it had nearly vanished from everyday use, surviving mostly in dictionaries and historical texts, until a small revival began around the turn of the millennium. Its return has been modest and unhurried—very on brand.

Are we likely to meet our friends on the morrow again? Probably not.

But it is comforting to know that we still can.