This year’s Halloween euphoria coincides with another mainstream craze – the world premiere of the 24th James Bond movie – Spectre. Given the meaning of the word spectre, the choice of this spooky release date proves to be not random at all. The new movie of the saga was eagerly awaited, since the James Bond series have gained a cult following among the cinemaphiles and adventure lovers all over the world.
Spectre is actually the British spelling of the word, whereas the American is specter. In the English language, the word spectre has been adopted by the French spectre, circa late 1500s. The word derived from the Latin spectrum (appearance, vision) from the root specere (to look, to see).
In its most common usage the word stands for a terrifying apparition, a phantom, a ghost. For the first time it was mentioned in the 1605 English translation done by Zacharie Jones (from French, author Pierre le Loyer) of one of the first modern books trying to explain the supernatural, and the possibility of existence of real ghosts “A treatise of Specters or strange Sights, Visions and Apparitions appearing sensibly unto men. Wherein is delivered the nature of Spirits, Angels, and etc”
In a figurative sense, spectre can stand for a unreal object of thought, phantasm of the brain, for example – “When the Mind is taken up in Vision, and fixes its view either on any real Object, or mere Spectre of Divinity”, in the essay Letter concerning Enthusiasm from 1708 by the philosopher and author Anthony Ashley Cooper aka The Third Earl of Shaftesbury.
Spectre can also name the source or object of terror and dread, imagined as an apparition. “Death… is a spectre which frights us at a distance.”, as Oliver Goldsmith argues in his study “A History of the Earth And Animated Nature“, published in 1774.
Another usage of the word is also as a faint shadow or imitation of something, which Charlotte Bronte masterfully exemplifies in “Shirley“, in 1849: “With the strangest spectre of a laugh.”
As for James Bond, the spectre term was originally conceived by Ian Fleming back in 1959 for the novel Thunderball as a villain organisation threatening the British government. Was the organisation a phantasm of the novelist’s brain and is Bond fighting against ghosts, are yet other questions, but the name is actually an acronym which stands for the Special Executive for Counter-intelligence, Terrorism, Revenge and Extortion.
