Etymon #34
Not negative blood
The word entered English in the late fourteenth century, borrowed from Old French. Chaucer used it in the Canterbury Tales, composed around 1387, to describe the complexion of one of his pilgrims.
It came from Old French, which had taken it from Latin. The Latin source meant of blood or belonging to blood. John Trevisa, translating Bartholomaeus Anglicus's De Proprietatibus Rerum into English around 1398, used it to describe a shade of red sitting between crimson and scarlet. The word arrived in English carrying that vivid physical sense, though it would not keep it for long.
The Latin root meant blood. From blood came the colour, the deep red of it. Medieval physicians believed the body contained four fluids, called humours, each producing its own temperament. Three of those temperaments gave English the words PHLEGMATIC, CHOLERIC, and MELANCHOLIC. The fourth gave English this word. Each meaning grew from the one before it, and all of them grew from the single Latin word for blood.
Two other words in English carry the same Latin root for blood. SANG-FROID came from the French for cold blood, the composure of someone who stays cool under pressure. SANGRIA took its name from the Spanish word for bloodletting. All three trace back to the same Latin word, though the senses have travelled far apart.
The four humours doctrine began with Hippocrates in fifth-century Greece and was systematised by the Roman physician Galen in the second century AD. It dominated European medicine for over a thousand years. In this system the person whose blood predominated over the other three humours was ruddy-faced, warm, courageous, amorous, and disposed to cheerfulness. By around 1500 the word had detached itself from medical language entirely, coming to mean cheerfully optimistic in the face of difficulty. D.H. Lawrence put it best. 'He was too healthy and… to be wretched'.
