2829: Decline of Humorous Words Sep 18, 2024
Although no one seriously believes in the theory of the Four Humors, or humourism—that four specific bodily fluids control more or less all aspects of health and also personality—this was an important idea for thousands of years that shaped medicine, such as in the practice of bloodletting and the idea cholera was caused by an abundance of choler (yellow bile), but also it appears in language. Plenty of these have been covered on the blog before, including
Humor and humid
Melancholy and by extension choleric
Some of these words, on the other hand, have mostly fallen by the wayside, such as ‘phlegmatic’ meaning ‘lethargic, sluggish’ which was relatively common still in the early 19th century and declining precipitously from there, and likewise with ‘sanguine’ (from blood) meaning ‘warm, optimistic’ on a similar if not more sudden drop. ‘Bilious’ is not so common now, but it was never as common as the others, but another bile-related humor term, ‘lurid’ has increased in popularity, once only related to the sickly pale-yellow and by extension horror, it has now actually gained more meanings to mean shocking or graphic. On the whole, these have seen a sharp decline with the rise of modern medicine, and even where the words are still in use, no one would connect them at all to bodily fluids.