Is “Ur-moment” a normal English expression?

Solution 1:

Arguably, no, Ur-moment is not a “normal” English expression for most people.

However, it really depends on the company you keep whether it is normal or not. That’s because ur- is indeed a reasonably productive prefix meaning the original version of something in literary and academic registers, and has been such ever since the second half of the 19^th century.

It was borrowed from German. You see it in places like urtext edition, just as one example, to indicate the original, unabridged text of some work. I for example have scads of musical scores on my shelves all labelled Urtext. (OED: “Urtext or urtext: an original text; the earliest version.”)

Regarding ur- in general, the OED says that it is a prefix. . . .

representing German (also MHG., OHG.) ur-, denoting ‘primitive, original, earliest,’ as ur-Hamlet, ‑origin, ‑stock, etc. See also Urheimat, Urschleim, Ursprache, Urtext.

G. ursprache (= primitive language) has been freq. used in recent English philological works.

One thing that makes Ur-comment stand out is its capitalization. That’s for the most part of throw-back to its German origin, where all nouns are capitalized. The assimilated version in English is no longer customarily capitalized, as you will see from these OED citations:

• 1864 Max Müller Lect. Sci. Lang. (1871) II. 133 ― The most troublesome of all vowels, the neutral vowel, sometimes called Urvocal, better Unvocal.
• 1889 Jacobs Caxton’s Aesop I. 37 ― Any light he can throw on the Ur-origin of the Fables.
• 1901 Boas Kyd’s Wks. p. xlv, ― The Ur-Hamlet may have contained a number of these borrowings.
• 1926 A. Møller tr. Pedersen’s Israel I. i. 245 ― The word shēm is found in all Semitic languages and belongs to the absolutely certain ur-semitic components.
• 1927 A. H. McNeile Introd. to Study of New Testament iii. 50 ― It was an Ur-Evangelium, a primitive written Gospel, some say in Hebrew, some in Aramaic, on which our Gospels were based.
• 1937 O. Jespersen Analytic Syntax 142 ― Some well-known students of language who even call this [sc. ‘S is P’] the ‘urform’ of sentences.
• 1943 V. Nabokov in Atlantic Monthly May 69/2 ― The dreadful vulgarity, the Ur-Hitlerism of those ludicrous but vicious organisations.
• 1947 Auden Age of Anxiety (1948) ii. 46 ― For Long-Ago has been Ever-After since Ur-Papa gave The Primal Yawn that expressed all things.
• 1949 F. Fergusson Idea of Theater i. 26 ― An enactment of the Ur-Myth of the year‐god.
• 1950 Psychiatry XIII. 168/2 ― The concept of ur-language and ur-symbolism is of particular importance in Freud’s thought.
• 1964 C. S. Lewis Discarded Image iv. 54 ― Plato’s ur-Freudian doctrine of the dream as the expression of a submerged wish.
• 1966 Punch 9 Nov. 718/2 ― Above is Leonardo da Vinci’s design for an ur-tank.
• 1971 Astrophysics & Space Sci. X. 363 (heading) ― Orientation of galaxies and a magnetic ‘urfield’.
• 1977 Listener 31 Mar. 416/1 ― The importance of the folk example which he [sc. Bartók] argued to be one of the ur-sources of music.
• 1979 Listener 14 June 831/1 ― Sir Nikolaus Pevsner’s ur-history, Pioneers of Modern Design.
• 1983 Sunday Tel. 13 Mar. 14/6 ― Russell Hoban is an ur-novelist, a maverick voice that is like no other.

Notice how in the fullness of time, it has lost its initial capital. That’s what makes your Ur-moment stand out for me: not its existence but its archaic capitalization, which some might consider a trifle “precious” or eye-grabbing.

It does often retain its hyphen, albeit not always. There is some potential for ambiguity without it. For example, urgent just means demanding, but an ur-gent might be Adam. 😇

So you can think of an ur-thing (now probably better spelled urthing) as the first one, or the archetype, or the defining moment in this case, the seed that gave rise to everything else.

Solution 2:

Ur in this case refers to the first, so Ur-moment means the first moment.

This meaning stems from the German ur-, meaning proto, or original.

Apart from being bit of a fancy way of saying "the first", it is often used to distinguish from a series of like events, the Ur- being the very first of the series. Alternately it refers to the first during a time where the subject is still in a primal form. For example, urlanguage is synonymous with proto-language, an ancestral language whose form greatly differs from its modern decendants. TVTropes also uses the concept of Ur Example to refer to the first instance that a certain trope appeared, which is somewhat different from the Trope Maker, where the form of the trope is unambiguous.

Incidentally, there is a bit of a misconception that it comes from the ancient Sumerian city of Ur, well known as one of the most ancient cities in the world. This seems to be a coincidence.

Solution 3:

No, the prefix "ur-" is not a common construction in English, as demonstrated by the quoted writer mis-using it and their editor not noticing. As tchrist's dictionary quotes explain, the "ur-X" is the original X. The common example is the play Hamlet. There seems to have been a play about a character called Hamlet floating around for about a decade before Shakespeare wrote his play. This original play is referred to the "ur-Hamlet". The prefix is also used in linguistics, philosophy and mathematical logic and set-theory.

But the writer quoted in the question talks about an "ur-moment": an original moment. The ur-moment would either be the birth of the universe or perhaps the birth or conception of the person who had the ur-moment. The moment of realising that manipulating her neck could allegedly cure ear infections is not an ur-moment but a eureka moment (as mentioned in the question).