Wednesday, May 03, 2006

In Good Humour

Melancholy. Strange word. Melan-choly.

You may not think so, but while I reflected over the day in the bath...It came to me. Was that how I was feeling? Meh. A little lonely, in "miss" perhaps. Nights I don't have lil' Grunt have an air of emptiness. See, growing up with a brother and father both whom I am very close to AND always have access to AND being the youngest AND the only girl...Sometimes, well, it takes me a little while to adjust to being alone. Once there, it's a crazy-fun-wonderful place. There's no denying it, I really love the men in my life (and my friend's husbands, what a great lot you are! ... Yeah, my friends are alright too ;-) (the best) Canada ~ thanks for the movie invite and ML you did great on your skates tonight and supper was awesome) :-)

I decided to look up the origin of the word. Being in a shitty mood, having a shitty outlook, shit for brains, or just plain being full of shit suddenly had new meaning...

"Sam" writes:

Etymology: Middle English malencolie, from Middle French melancolie, from Late Latin melancholia, from Greek, from melan- + cholE bile -- more at GALLDate: 14th century
1 a : an abnormal state attributed to an excess of black bile and characterized by irascibility or depression b : BLACK BILE c : MELANCHOLIA
2 a : depression of spirits : DEJECTION b : a pensive mood

Thed above is from Merriam Webster. The history has to do with personality profiling of the Greeks first developed Hippocrates.

To the ancient Greeks, the personality was an integral part of a person's general health. They believed that the body contained four fundamental liquids (called humours) based on the four elements of fire, air, water and earth. When one of these humours became dominant over the others, it was thought to effect the person's mood and personality.

The four humours, blood, yellow bile, phlegm and black bile, were each believed to be responsible for a different type of personality. An excess of blood made a person sanguine, yellow bile resulted in a choleric personality, phlegm, naturally, produced a phlegmatic outlook, and black bile was associated with melancholia.

These theories, first set down in a systematic way by Hippocrates, remained in use until the middle ages. We now know, of course, that they have no basis in medical fact, but what the Greeks had almost incidentally achieved was the first systematic method of describing personality types. So successful was their approach that, even today, the words 'humour' (meaning 'mood'), 'sanguine', 'phlegmatic' and 'melancholic' are still in common use.

Thankfully, modern personality profiling does not rely on measuring the amount of yellow bile in a person to determine their personality style, but the ideas behind it can, indirectly, be traced back to Hippocrates' theories.

PS. This is not to be confused with the 'Melon Collie', which is a dog that looks like Lassie and shows a particular nack for finding and fetching melons of all varieties. Sam


3 Comments:

Blogger Canada said...

Oh, I don't know. . . I think we both know someone who has an excess of yellow bile (or maybe it's just an excess of red wine!).

Nice picture! Where on earth did you find it?

Thursday, 04 May, 2006  
Blogger nancycle said...

Yes, well I'll leave that one alone. That's not for me.

The picture! Yes, from some German dude's blog which came complete with pictures of, yes, David Hasselhoff!!! LOL

Thursday, 04 May, 2006  
Blogger nancycle said...

Alienation, admittance and love all in the same comment.

I'll take the hug and raise you a hug!

xo Thx Boo

Thursday, 04 May, 2006  

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