matinée

Matinée comes from French matin (morning), from Latin matutinus (of the morning), from Matuta, the Roman goddess of dawn. In French, a matinée is a morning event, a morning reception, or a morning performance. The word is straightforward: it happens in the matinée, the morning part of the day.

English borrowed the word in the nineteenth century and immediately shifted it. In English, a matinée was an afternoon performance — a daytime showing as opposed to an evening one. This made sense from the perspective of English theatergoers: the main performance was in the evening, and any earlier showing was 'the morning one,' even if it happened at 2 p.m. The French word for morning became the English word for afternoon.

Matinée idols emerged in the early twentieth century — actors who were especially popular with the women who attended afternoon performances while their husbands were at work. The term was slightly condescending, implying that matinée audiences were less serious than evening ones. Rudolph Valentino, John Barrymore, and later Cary Grant were all called matinée idols. The word carried a gendered assumption about who went to the theater in the daytime.

Movie theaters adopted the word wholesale. A matinée showing is the early screening — cheaper tickets, lighter crowds, the movie before the crowds arrive. The word has shed its theatrical specificity and now means any daytime showing of any entertainment. The Roman goddess of dawn would be puzzled. Her morning somehow became everyone's afternoon.