Bygone
adjective
Having occurred, manifested, or concluded at a prior time or point, especially one which has long since elapsed
noun
An occurrence, instance, or event that was resolved or concluded long ago
Usage
One thing common to many civilizations is their fascinations with history. It should come as no surprise that this is the case, though: it is only by studying the events of bygone ages, however distant, that we can appreciate the constant of human nature throughout. After all, “those who fail to learn from history are doomed to repeat it.”
Bygone is an adjective which describes something as having taken place or manifested at some earlier point, particularly if that point was quite a long time ago. Thus, a bygone era would be a period from distant history, and a bygone idea would be one that was devised and prevalent long before the present time. While it can refer to something that simply belongs to an earlier period, bygone often suggests that what it characterizes has long ceased to be relevant or significant. The theory that the Earth is flat, for example, is a bygone notion, as it was not only hypothesized a long time ago, but has long since been proven false and no longer has any bearing on contemporary science or geography.
The word bygone can also take the form of a noun to indicate an incident which took place in the distant past. What constitutes “distant” is subjective, but it usually amounts to some years at the very least. To an adult, birth might be a bygone, and to most of us the signing of the Magna Carta certainly is! Many times, particularly as part of the phrase “let bygones be bygones,” the noun form of the word implies that the occurrence is, or should be considered to be, no longer relevant. This idiom essentially exhorts the listener to leave old events, especially hurtful or damaging ones, in the past, and to cease to afford them any credence or importance. In essence, to “let bygones be bygones” is to bury the hatchet by acknowledging that the passage of time has made past conflicts seem unimportant. Whatever is bygone, or is a bygone, is probably long gone now.
Example: His terrible score on the bygone test still haunted him, impelling him to study much harder for the rest of the semester.
Example: The city of Vienna abounds with triumphal monuments of the bygone era when Hapsburg emperors dominated central Europe.
Example: Their hurtful spat was now a distant bygone, as they had since become close friends.
Origin
Bygone comes from the union of the English words by and gone, the resultant term first attested sometime in the early 1400s. The word by comes from the Old English be, or bi, both of which mean “close to," "of," or "in,” and, prior to that, from the Proto-Germanic bi, meaning “near” or “of.” Gone is the past participle of go, which derives from the Old English term gan, meaning “to proceed, advance, walk,” and also “to occur.” Gan originates from the West Germanic word gaian. The use of bygone as a noun followed the adjective midway through the following century.
In Literature
From Elias Canetti's The Human Province:
There are books, that one has for twenty years without reading them, that one always keeps at hand...yet one carefully refrains from reading even a complete sentence. Then after twenty years, there comes a moment when suddenly, as though under a high compulsion, one cannot help taking in such a book from beginning to end, at one sitting: it is like a revelation. Now one knows why one made such a fuss about it. It had to be with one for a long time; it had to travel; it had to occupy space; it had to be a burden; and now it has reached the goal of its voyage, now it reveals itself, now it illuminates the twenty bygone years it mutely lived with one.
In this passage, Canetti describes the curious way that books can go from being dutifully kept practically unopened in our libraries before being consumed voraciously. The impetus that spurs this change is the long passage of time, and the implication of personal change that has occurred which, in a way, justifies (or at least explains) the decades of long-past, or bygone, neglect a book might suffer on our shelves. This paragraph is also excellent for bibliophiles to keep handy for the occasional tiff with the spouse on needing to hoard books from a bygone era.
Mnemonic
What's come and gone by is bygone.
Tags
Past, History, Old, Time
Bring out the linguist in you! What is your own interpretation of bygone. Did you use bygone in a game? Provide an example sentence or a literary quote.