The word wilderness once meant desolate wasteland, not sacred refuge

Evidence

Go back 250 years in American and European history, and you do not find nearly so many people wandering around remote corners of the planet looking for what today we would call “the wilderness experience.” As late as the eighteenth century, the most common usage of the word “wilderness” in the English language referred to landscapes that generally carried adjectives far different from the ones they attract today. To be a wilderness then was to be “deserted,” “savage,” “desolate,” “barren”—in short, a “waste,” the word’s nearest synonym. Its connotations were anything but positive, and the emotion one was most likely to feel in its presence was “bewilderment” or terror. — William Cronon, The Trouble with Wilderness; or,…, 8

Categorization

• DEFINE: Etymological pivot: the eighteenth-century meaning of wilderness as ‘waste’ grounds the essay’s whole historicist reversal.
• recurring: this claim recurs 2 times within its source
• XREF: connects to: Wilderness is a cultural construction, not an untouched natural sanctuary — William Cronon, The Trouble with Wilderness; or,…, 5; Early romantic writers experienced the sublime as terror, not pleasure — William Cronon, The Trouble with Wilderness; or,…, 16; Wilderness originally signified biblical places of moral peril and exile — William Cronon, The Trouble with Wilderness; or,…, 9 (+4 more)

Related

• Before the nineteenth century, wilderness meant wasteland and evoking terror, not beauty (similarity 0.96)
• By the late nineteenth century the wilderness sublime had been domesticated into sentimentality (similarity 0.88)
• Wilderness is a state of mind defined by wonder, not a fact of nature (similarity 0.88)
• Wilderness originally signified biblical places of moral peril and exile (similarity 0.86)
• Wilderness wonder is a cultural state of mind, not a natural fact (similarity 0.86)
• Wilderness is a cultural construction, not an untouched natural sanctuary (similarity 0.85)
• Wilderness appreciation was an elite urban leisure projection, not a rural ideal. (similarity 0.83)
• Wilderness is a cultural construct, not a place that exists apart from humanity (similarity 0.83)
• William Cronon — The Trouble with Wilderness; or, Getting Back to the Wrong Nature (similarity 0.82)
• The sublime and the frontier jointly remade wilderness into its modern form (similarity 0.80)
• Wilderness recreation is a class privilege that devalues rural land-based labor (similarity 0.80)

Broader Connections

• Before the nineteenth century, wilderness meant wasteland and evoking terror, not beauty #corroborates (0.98) — William Cronon, The Trouble with Wilderness; or,…, 8
• Wilderness is a cultural construct, not a place that exists apart from humanity #expands (0.80) — William Cronon, The Trouble with Wilderness; or,…, 5
• Wilderness is a state of mind defined by wonder, not a fact of nature #expands (0.75)
• Wilderness wonder is a cultural state of mind, not a natural fact #expands (0.75) — William Cronon, The Trouble with Wilderness; or,…, 78