Canopy
The English meaning of ornamental cloth suspended over a bed or altar came directly from medieval Latin canopeum > classical Latin cōnōpēum , -eum , -ium ‘net of fine gauze about the bed, mosquito net, tent.’
The Latin was borrowed from Attic Greek κωνωπεῖον konopeion ‘an Egyptian bed or couch with mosquito netting’ < κάνωψ kanops ‘gnat, mosquito.’ Its Greek form and spelling were perhaps influenced by the name of the ancient Egyptian city of Canopus. Compare canopic jars containing the embalmed innards and bundled disemboweled entrails of mummified Egyptians. But the word itself, kanops, according to J. B. Hofmann’s Etymological Dictionary of Ancient Greek and Eric Partridge’s Origins, is a direct loan from Hieroglyphic Egyptian khenus, khnemes ‘gnat, mosquito, housefly’ with the addition of a familiar Greek noun suffix – ops, opis.
Our English poets have clasped the word to their talkative bosoms, especially to denote the heavens above, the starry welkin, the overhanging sky, notable among users, the Bard of Avon, exampled in the profligate beauty of Shakespeare’s Elizabethan word music which as prose adorns this passage from Act 2 of Hamlet (1604 CE) where the gloomy Dane attempts to delineate his sad humour:
HAMLET
“I have of late, but wherefore
I know not, lost all my mirth, forgone all custom of exercise;
and indeed, it goes so heavily with my disposition;
that this goodly frame the Earth, seems to me a sterile
Promontory; this most excellent Canopy the Air,
look you, this brave o’er-hanging, this Majestical Roof,
fretted with golden fire: why, it appears no other thing
to me, then a foul and pestilent congregation of vapours.”
Forest Canopy
The most modern meaning of canopy in English is the dense crown of leaves and branches formed when tropical trees “crowd into a shade,” to quote the lyrics from one of Handel’s pretty tunes “Where'er You Walk.”
Other Meanings of Canopy
The part of a grapevine that grows above ground has the technical  name in viticulture of canopy.
The cloth and suspensory apparatus of a parachute are its canopy.
The canopy at a Jewish wedding under which the happy couple stands is in Hebrew a chuppah, in English a canopy.
A pope may award to a particularly supine basilica, one whose prelates toady to all papal nincompoopery an ornamental umbraculum (Latin ‘little shade’), often called in press releases a quilted canopy or ombrellino (Italian ‘little shade’).
Canopy In French
Latin canopeum also billowed gently over fifteenth-century French in forms like conopée or canopie ‘tent’ and canapé ‘sofa, couch.’ Around the end of the seventeenth century, French chefs filched the word to name choice dainties and saliva-inducing savouries served atop crisp bread squares, so-called little “canopies” to cover the bread cube.
Thus a new meaning of canapé appeared, this sense still alive in pompous culinary English: The Countess of Reflux swished into the banquet hall and whispered to her maid, Pyrosis, “I don’t think that larks’ tongues served on a bed of lattice is too arcane a canapé. The lattice-lettuce pun will surely register agreeably with all my guests and literate diners, n’est-ce pas, ma petite Pyrose?”
copyright © William Gordon Casselman 2012
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