Let Me Tell You About Cloud Nine According to the Temptations, you can be what you wanna be and you ain’t got no responsibility. While their use of double negatives is grammatically incorrect, the message is meaningful: every man is free and you’re a million miles from reality (“Temptations”). George Harrison, most well known for being in the British rock band the Beatles, also alludes to the clouds as he tells listeners that he’ll show them cloud nine, and to “take my smile and my heart, they were yours from the start. The pieces to omit are mine” (“Harrison”). What exactly is cloud nine and how did it get so popular? What about all of the other clouds? To answer questions such as these, we have to break the words down. “Cloud” comes from the Old English word ‘clud’ which means ‘mass of rock’. This later came to mean mass of rock or water around the year 1200 due to the similarities of water and rocks. The Old English word “skie” also meant cloud, and later became the word ‘sky’ (“Cloud”). “Nine” also comes from an Old English word: nigen. There’s a few other origins though, such as the Proto Germanic word ‘niwun’ and the Latin word ‘novem’ (“Nine”). …show more content…
Originally, there were four types of clouds: cirrus, cumulus, stratus, and nimbus. They were introduced by Luke Howard in 1802 (“Cloud”). Later on, in 1895, the International Cloud Atlas decided there were ten types of clouds. Number nine was the cumulonimbus, which was the biggest, puffiest, and fluffiest ("Cloud Nine"). If clouds weren’t masses of water that would cause you to fall 30,000 to 40,000 feet to the ground soaking wet, the cumulonimbus would be the one to float on and relax ("World"). The phrase could also be a reference to Buddhism, as cloud nine is one of the stages to enlightenment for one that’s destined to become a Buddha. Clouds seven and eight have also been referenced, but nine has been the most popular since the eighties