Etymon #53
Keats darkest ode
The word entered English around 1300, carried across from Old French. Behind the French lay a Greek compound built from two roots, one naming a colour, the other naming a fluid the body produced.
It travelled from Greek into Latin, and from Latin into Old French, before reaching English around 1300. The Greek form had been in use since at least the fifth century BC, when physicians traced the disorders of the mind to the balance of fluids in the body. That understanding reached England through medical writing. Chaucer used the word in the 1380s, in the Nun's Priest's Tale, to describe an unsettled night's sleep.
Behind the Greek compound lay two older words. The first was melas, meaning 'black', from a Proto-Indo-European root *mel- meaning 'of darkish colour'. The second was khole, meaning 'bile', the bitter fluid the body produces in the liver, from a Proto-Indo-European root *ghel- meaning 'to shine or gleam'. Ancient physicians believed the body contained four such fluids, each governing a temperament, and that an excess of bile, in its blackened form, settled in the spleen and cast darkness over the mind.
CHOLERA and GALL share the same root as one element of this compound. CHOLERA came into English from Greek kholera, the name ancient physicians gave to a violent disorder they attributed to an excess of bile. GALL was the Old English word for bile itself, and survives today in the sense of brazen impudence, the bile of behaviour rather than the body.
Aristotle's school argued that all men of genius were touched by this temperament. Robert Burton devoted over a thousand pages to the subject in 1621, producing one of the most widely read books of the seventeenth century. John Keats, in 1819, argued in verse that its truest shrine was found not in despair but in the fleeting beauty of the world. By the early nineteenth century the word was no longer used only as a medical term. It had become a mark of depth, sensitivity, and creative intelligence. Today it is also used to describe the feeling caused by overwhelming flow of digital information.
