760: narcolepsy and narcotics Jan 6, 2017

If you enforce drug-laws, or are just a real bummer at parties, then you could be called a 'narc'. This word was formed from 'narcotics' which is derived from a Greek word, 'narkoun' meaning ‘make numb’. While no one would call someone with narcolepsy a narc justifiable, the condition is named similarly, from 'narkē' which means ‘numbness’. Still, much like how the suffix '-aholic' in 'workaholic' was invented from association to another word, 'alcoholic' and not from a historic suffix, the '-psy' suffix does not mean anything by historically. Instead, the ending was created on the pattern of 'epilepsy' which has the Greek tmesis, 'lambanein' meaning 'to take hold of', and 'epi-' as a prefix.