In the 1300s there were people who called themselves “physicians” who had some ideas we consider somewhat strange today. They knew about the brain, for example, and at least had a better idea than the ancient Egyptians did about its function (the Egyptians considered the brain unimportant; thinking, to them, occurred in the heart). The 14th century physicians also saw that the brain had different parts, and surmised that those parts did different things. They believed the brain was divided into three parts, which they called “cells:” the “fore-brain” controlled imagination, the “middle-brain” controlled judgement, and the “rear-brain” was the seat of memory.
Just like today, where it’s not uncommon to casually refer to someone being “left brained” or “right brained” (even though even that idea isn’t right either), the notion of the three cells of the brain made its way out of physicians’ technical jargon — such as it was — and into everyday speech. And writing. In “The Knight’s Tale”, Chaucer refers to the forebrain:
“And in his geere for al the world he ferde
Nat oonly lik the loveris maladye
Of Hereos, but rather lyk manye,
Engendred of humour malencolik
Biforen, his celle fantastik.”
(And in his behavior for all the world he acted
Not only like the lover’s malady
Of heroes, but rather like mania,
Engendered of humor melancholic
In the fore-brain, his cell fantastic.)
In talking about the fore-brain, Chaucer uses, for one of the very first times on record, the word “fantastic.” The word certainly existed before that; it goes back to the Ancient Greek φανταστικός (phantastikos). It means to become visible, and a closely related Greek word is φαντάζεσθαι (phantazesthai), which means to have visions — that is, to imagine. The Greeks used also used it to refer to hallucinations. “Fantastic” made its way into Latin (fantasticus) and Old French, and was finally brought to England by the Norman invasion in 1066 (you wonder how the Normans managed to invade, weighed down by all that language).
At the time “fantastic” had two meanings; either something imagined or something supernatural. Chaucer used it to mean imagination, and that may have been the more common usage, because by the end of the following century the use of “fantastic” to mean anything other than imaginative had largely faded away.
The meaning continued to evolve in a direction that was pretty fantastic itself — by the 1500s it also meant something extravagant or even grotesque. Today’s sense of “fantastic” as excellent is fantastically recent — it didn’t show up until around the middle of the 20th century. Mary Allingham, who wrote crime novels in the 1930s, wrote in her 1938 book “The Fashion in the Shrouds:”
“Oh Val, isn’t it fantastic? It’s amazing, isn’t it?”
In addition to whatever its primary meaning (at a given time) was, “fantastic” has apparently always had interesting connotations — usage of the word has for centuries been fantastic (imaginative), if not fantastic (supernatural), although some more conservative authors may have felt it was too fantastic (extravagant). So keep “fantastic” in your fantastic fore-brain!
