Have you ever thought about the words you use to show appreciation for something? Or better yet, have you ever considered what the words you use to show excitement mean? You might say a very modern “cool,” or a more traditional “good,” or a Midwestern “neat,” or a more midcentury “groovy.” There could be a “dude” thrown in there if that’s your style, or you could go even further and offer an “awesome” or a “fantastic,” or Mr. Spock’s own measured “fascinating” into the mix. There’s one such exclamation that bears some consideration, one that is “wonderful” to behold.

What does it mean when something is wonderful? What does it mean to be full of wonder? Growing up I knew the word wonder from the Age of Empires series of computer games where a player could win the game by building a wonder and keeping it standing for 2,000 years in the game’s time (10 minutes in our own reckoning). I always wanted to build wonders in those games but was never quite good enough a player as a child to get to that point. 

There are other uses of the word wonder that come to mind like the German Wunderkind, or Wonder-Child, whose abilities outmatch all others. Or there’s the 2016 Sir Elton John album Wonderful Crazy Night that I got to see him promote and perform on the night when I was in the audience at the Graham Norton Show in London. Wonder is a flexible word because of how lofty an idea it evokes. There are wonderous things out there that are worldly, like the blueberry danishes at McLain’s Bakery in Kansas City, and there are wonders unimaginable to behold like the visions of previously unimaginable beauty seen by the James Webb Space Telescope in recent months.

In the last couple years, I’ve come across the word wonder more and more in my work. It is one of the best English translations of the French word singularité which appears frequently in my primary sources, a word which can be translated as both “individuality [and] uniqueness” as well as a “peculiarity [or an] oddity.” Une singularité is a wonderous thing because it defies expectations. The wonders beheld by the European explorers who arrived on the Atlantic shores of these continents five centuries ago opened their eyes to visions they could not previously have imagined. They became “marvelous possessions” as the literary scholar Stephen Greenblatt described in a landmark study of the First Age of Exploration. 

In my own specialization the 3-toed sloth was a wonder to behold for all these very reasons. It was a mammal that did not seem to provide any usefulness to the humans who lived around it. Nor did it seem to contribute to its own ecosystem by hunting or foraging beyond whatever it could slowly grasp in its own favorite tree. What’s more an especially wonderous claim was made by one of the leading sloth writers of the day, a Frenchman named André Thevet (1506–1590) that claimed because there was no eyewitness evidence of the sloth eating or drinking that had been proven by a European then the animal must be one of only a very small number, if not a true singularité in that it could “live only on air.”

Another place where the word wonder appears is in religion. In Exodus 3 where Moses encounters God at the Burning Bush, God says that when the Pharoah of Egypt does not heed God’s command to let the Hebrews go that God “will stretch out [God’s] hand and strike Egypt” “with wonderous deeds.” (Exodus 3:20 NAB) These same wonders were then performed by Moses and his brother Aaron to assert God’s will that their people should be freed (Exodus 11:10), leading to a transformation in the relationship between the Egyptians and the Hebrews from master and slave to former oppressor and the defiant.

To be wonderous is to be unfathomable, to be terrifying in power and incomprehensibility. The other great nearly religious experience where I’ve heard the word wonder used is in those moments of joy when words fail, and song takes over. I’m of course talking about falling in love, and of that great Gershwin song “S’Wonderful,” which I first heard in the 1951 Gene Kelly film An American in Paris sung by the Pittsburgh native song and dance man himself alongside the French cabaret singer and actor Georges Guétary. It’s one of those songs that I know by heart, having played the film’s album enough times and seen it quite a few at that. One of these days I’ll sing it for myself.