My discombobulation was caused by the fact that, in my own mind at least, uncanny has never meant anything of the sort; in fact it is a word that I would be most likely to use welded to, either explicitly or (understood), a coincidence or a resemblance. And, whether via an association I made up for myself or because somebody taught me so, it is related to the good old English word ken, meaning either to know or, in a now obsolete sense, “to generate, engender, beget; to conceive; to give birth to.”
A coincidence or resemblance may well be disconcerting, certainly surprising or unexpected, but never truly unsettling, disturbing or frightening; that would be spooky.
And rather than being the stuff of horror movies, bad dreams or the supernatural the uncanny is simply another manifestation of connectedness, the wonderful way of the world. Not hellish at all, just one of those previously undreamt things in heaven or earth.
The OED does give one definition related to home, or at least a house – it was used as such in old vagabonds' slang to mean especially a house where thieves, beggars, or disreputable characters meet or lodge.But the use of uncanny to mean ‘Partaking of a supernatural character; mysterious, weird, uncomfortably strange or unfamiliar’ became common in English only in the mid C19th according to the OED & the earliest quotation to illustrate its use in this way comes from that great popular novelist. Edward Bulwer-Lytton.
The programme’s concentration on the spooky side of uncanny which ‘really is discernable everywhere in fiction, film and art’ stems from a 1919 Essay by the old fraud Freud.
Links
BBC Radio 4: The Uncanny
John Peel
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BBC Radio 4: The Uncanny
John Peel
Related posts
Serendipity proves I exist in a world
The Universe as a bundle of thrums
