August 29, 1996

sea change

The dictionary definition of sea change ("a change brought about by the sea") doesn't seem to match its current use as indicating a complete change from what's held in the past ("It's a sea change--yes, the network really is the computer." John Doerr in The Red Herring). What's the current meaning of sea change and from where did it come?

The usual sense of sea change is 'a major transformation or alteration'. The phrase is an allusion to a passage in Shakespeare's The Tempest:

Full fathom five thy father lies;

Of his bones are coral made;

Those are pearls that were his eyes:

Nothing of him that doth fade

But doth suffer a sea-change

Into something rich and strange.

(The Tempest I.ii, spelling modernized)