superman

In 1903, George Bernard Shaw put a new label on an old philosophical ambition when his play Man and Superman translated Nietzsche’s German Übermensch into English. Nietzsche had introduced the idea in Thus Spoke Zarathustra, published in the 1880s: not merely a muscular champion, but a person imagined to rise beyond conventional moral limits. The modest-looking prefix super- comes from Latin super, “above,” the same upward-looking bit found in words such as supernumerary and insuperable. Meanwhile, man is an ancient Germanic survivor meaning “human being,” though English gradually narrowed it toward “adult male”; linguists still debate whether it is related to a PIE root meaning “to think,” which would make a man literally “one who thinks.” Then Jerry Siegel and Joe Shuster gave the philosophical term a cape, and Superman’s first appearance in Action Comics #1 in 1938 turned an abstract over-human into a champion who could leap buildings and rescue the innocent. The memorable trick is that superman began as an argument about human potential and ended as a proper name for the fellow who makes gravity look negotiable.