I keep seeing things about “that was/wasn’t canon”, “…head canon…” and everything else of the like and I for the life of me can’t figure out what it means other than that it was something that was supposed to happen. And like how would you use it in a sentence?
In: Other
Canon is an old Greek word that originally means rule (as in, a rule of a game or ruling as in a judge does). It came to Latin and from there to English.
In the development of the language, canon got a very specific meaning. Historically there was one very important ruling when priests decided to put together the Bible. Up until that point there was no official Christian Bible, only a bunch of texts. This event, this ruling was called canonization of the Bible, and the official version of Bible was the canonical (“ruled”) version as opposed to unofficial versions that vere present in those times.
So when the word finally came to English, it brought the meaning of rule as in “a set of rules agreed upon”, but it’s more often used as a “set of books or stories or other things being official” as opposed to unofficial or exceptional. For example in biology there are 20 normal amino acids and there are some weird ones called non-canonical.
In pop culture canonical or canon often refers to the story or lore from the official author (like Harry Potter stories coming from Rowling) as opposed to stories written by fans (so called fanfic). It’s possible for example that a fanfic is written with a character but the author kills that character before the timeline of the fanfic so the fanfic can’t fit the canon. Or a fan writes a different ending that contradicts the canon.
Latest Answers