Speaking of Words
By MICHAEL FERBER
If my title leads you to hope this column is about amusing things in English, such as funny words like “hornswoggle” and “discombobulate,” I’m afraid I’ll disappoint you. Words like those I may take up in a future column, but in this one I want to talk about “humor” in the original sense, that is, any of the four humors of ancient medicine and the traces they have left in English, starting with “humor” itself. These traces give us another example of the way languages preserve cultural fossils, like “horsepower” and “salary,” but in this case it is a whole system of ideas that few people still remember and fewer still believe in.
“Humor” by itself today can be a category of movie or book, and to have “a sense of humor” is to laugh readily at certain situations or perhaps to tell good jokes. But we also have the phrase “good humor,” which means something like “good mood,” and we have “ill humor” and “bad humor,” like “bad mood.” So “humor” must have meant something broader than laughter or jokes, something like “temperament.” In Shakespeare we find such phrases as “her mad and headstrong humor” (The Taming of the Shrew), while his contemporary playwright Ben Jonson wrote a play called Every Man in his Humour.
The word goes back to Latin humor, more often spelled umor, and it meant “fluid” or “juice.” It is akin to humidus, whence our word “humid.” It translates a Greek word, chymos, which meant “juice” or “sap,” related to a verb that meant “pour.” According to the famous physician Hippocrates there are four humors, that is, four fluids that can be found in all human beings. They should be in balance; no humor should predominate over the others. They are:
(1) Blood (Greek haima, Latin sanguis). When it is dominant, a person is brave, hopeful, cheerful, and amorous, which doesn’t sound so bad, but blood needs to be “tempered” to make the ideal “temperament.” We still use the word “sanguine” to mean “hopeful” or “confident”; it does not mean “bloody”—for that sense we have “sanguinary.”
(2) Bile (Greek chole [two syllables], Latin bilis) comes in two varieties, yellow and black. Yellow bile, which in English was called “choler,” causes anger or peevishness; it comes from the liver. “His bile was raised” means “He got angry.” A person with too much bile is “bilious” or “choleric,” words now a little quaint but not extinct. The modern French word for “anger” is colère.
(3) Black bile (Greek melaina chole, Latin atrabilis) causes gloominess or depression, and often irritableness. Our common word “melancholy” comes nearly unchanged from the Greek. “Atrabilious” may be found in dictionaries but is now quite rare; I recommend using it, however, the next time you find a friend in a black mood: you might make the friend laugh. Black bile is produced by the spleen, and “spleen” by itself can mean ill humor or irritableness; a “splenetic” person is melancholic, morose, irritable. The French borrowed “spleen” from English, and Baudelaire, who had a good deal of it, wrote four poems called “Spleen.” (But English borrowed ennui from French as a near-synonym of “spleen.”)
(4) Phlegm (Greek phlegma, Latin pituita) causes dullness, sluggishness, or apathy, but also imperturbability or detachment, a virtue in some circumstances. We still speak of “phlegmatic” people, though there may be nothing wrong with their mucus, the meaning of “phlegm” today. “Pituitary” in English refers only to the gland, which was thought to produce phlegm.
Besides “temperament” we have “temper,” which, as a noun, meant the right or proportionate mixture of humors. To “lose your temper” is to lose your composure or balance of emotions. You can be said to be in good or bad temper. “Temper” by itself has come to mean “ill-humor,” a proneness to outbursts of anger at slight provocation. “He has a quite a temper.” If that is the meaning of “temper,” then to lose it would be good, but the temper you should not lose is the older kind, a balanced temperament. “Composure” used to be a synonym for “temperament,” for the temperament was a composition of humors, it was composed of humors. Now “composure” has specialized to mean “calmness” or “tranquillity.”
We have yet another word from this ancient theory: “complexion.” Now it means the color and texture of the skin, a much narrower sense from its original meaning as a synonym for “temperament.” Chaucer writes, “Of his complexion he was sanguine” (“Introduction” to Canterbury Tales).
The theory of the humors was tied to the four qualities (hot, cold, dry, and wet) and the four elements (earth, water, air, and fire) in complicated ways. We use most of these categories metaphorically—a hot or fiery temper, a cold manner, a dry wit, an earthy sense of humor, an airy disregard for reality—but their connection to the humors is indirect. Ancient and medieval thinkers connected all of this into their astrological beliefs, whereby planets had “influences” on our temperaments. A synonym for “phlegmatic,” still in occasional use, is “saturnine,” named after Saturn, the slowest of the seven ancient planets. “Jovial” comes from Jove, or Jupiter; “mercurial” from Mercury. A “lunatic” is badly influenced by Luna, the moon. And some people have a “sunny” temper.
No modern doctor or scientist believes in humors, qualities, elements, or planets, but the English language still does. It still contains dozens of words drawn from medical and cosmological theories at least 2500 years old. It seems to have a strong sense of humor.
I am happy to hear from readers with questions or comments: mferber@unh.edu.
Michael Ferber moved to New Hampshire in 1987 to join the English Department at UNH, from which he is now retired. Before that he earned his BA in Ancient Greek at Swarthmore College and his doctorate in English at Harvard, taught at Yale, and served on the staff of the Coalition for a New Foreign Policy in Washington, DC. In 1968 he stood trial in Federal Court in Boston for conspiracy to violate the draft law, with the pediatrician Benjamin Spock and three other men. He has published many books and articles on literature, and has a deep interest in linguistics. He is married to Susan Arnold; they have a daughter in San Francisco.
