If aliens arrived tomorrow, what’s the first thing you’d ask them?
View all responses
Of which state are you? And what made it so
Different from the state that I am in.
Is it adjective or noun defines you
As alien , foreign to my senses
That before receiving you reject you,
Because bred and fed by love I cannot
Know. Or is it that I, your seeking gaze
Alienate, read to differ as object
Of my verb, loved one made to feel like hate.
So in the end, hate creates your lost state.
alien (adj.): c. 1300, “strange, foreign,” from Old French alien “strange, foreign;” as a noun, “an alien, stranger, foreigner,” from Latin alienus “of or belonging to another, not one’s own, foreign, strange,” also, as a noun, “a stranger, foreigner,” adjective from alius (adv.) “another, other, different” (from PIE root *al- (1) “beyond”).
The meaning “residing in a country not of one’s birth” is from mid-15c. The sense of “wholly different in nature” is from 1670s. The meaning “not of this Earth” is recorded by 1920. An alien priory (mid 15c.) is one owing obedience to a religious jurisdiction in a foreign country.
alien (n.): “foreigner, citizen of a foreign land,” early 14c., from alien (adj.) or from noun use of the adjective in French and Latin. In the science fiction sense “being from another planet,” from 1953.
