Primordial

What’s the very first thing that comes to mind when you read or hear the word primordial?

The words prime and order tell me that whatever it is that we’re talking about comes first. This seems to be consistent with the earliest Latin uses of primordium, where it came to mean the very earliest of something.

The ancient Romans used a word called ordiri to describe where to begin when weaving fabric from a loom. The order of operations was crucial, since you had to set up the vertical threads (the warp threads) before the horizontal threads could be woven through them.

You had to do the first things first.

This was like creating something from nothing, or order out of chaos. The word primordial may have started out mainly describing weaving and looms, but it quickly spread to more metaphorical realms. Anything that was created from chaos could be called primordial.

You’ve probably heard cosmologists using the term primordial soup by now. It’s tough to imagine a better use case than an entire universe emerging from chaos or nothingness, so it’s understandable that physicists have been using this term for nearly a century now.

Physicists and geologists talk about a primordial dust cloud that formed the Earth. This is the very first time most of the ingredients that made up our planet were together, so it’s a bit like those vertical warp thread you need to start weaving.

Life, too, has its own primordial beginnings, and biologists have adopted the word to describe a state of development. Primordial germ cells aren’t quite specific organs yet, but they are the very first things we can recognize as future versions of these structures. A primordial follicle in an ovary is the very first indication of reproductive ability.

Psychologists have run with this biological metaphor. A deeply embedded instinct that we didn’t learn from experience is called primordial. We don’t have to think about needing to eat or drink, because our bodies indicate this to us by way of hunger and thirst. We’re afraid of the dark because being out in the dark is dangerous. These are primordial impulses.

These examples from biology, geology, and psychology are notable, but we’ve only begun to scratch the surface of this word’s use. Where else have you heard the word primordial?