Humorism

a (less than stellar) joke i made inspired this one. it is more in the trend of aana's style than mine. let's see how it works.


right now i am in a less than stellar mood, so clearly it must mean an imbalance in my humors. then i began to wonder, which one? and why is this even in my lexicon of phrases to say?

apparently i have excess yellow bile.

so, we have Blood for the spring, which was originally called sanguine. this was regulated through your liver, and had qualities relating to being courageous, or hopeful. If you had excess Blood, you would excess at these qualities, whereas if you were lacking in these qualities, you were said to have less of a Blood balance. that is why sanguine means happy, or cheerful, or optimistic. The words (sanguine, choleric, melancholy, and phlegmatic) came from these ideas, not the other way around.

next we have Yellow Bile for the summer, which was originally called choleric. It was regulated via your gall bladder. it led to being easily angered, or bad tempered. thus excess yellow bile was generally considered a very bad thing, because it would make you grumpy, and irritable. :D

Black Bile is next for the fall, and it was originally called melancholy. this was regulated by the spleen, and associated with being despondent, sleepless, and irritable. I'd say this is the most commonly used word still, in modern culture. you can very often be described as being melancholy, but you don't often hear the other 3 words used in general, every day conversation. i find it interesting that the one that has stood the test of time has also shifted over time. when someone thinks of melancholy, it is usually just kind of a "down in the dumps" kind of thing, not the more intense level of being irritable that it meant in ancient times.

last is Phlegm, leading to (uncreatively) being phlegmatic. This was associated with your brain and lungs - for some reason. It is suppose to represent you being calm & unemotional. i find this one of the more logical ones that they came to, because when you are sick, your body produces a great deal of phlegm, and thus you have a runny nose. this would lead people to thing you had excess phlegm, and that was why you were so calm and dull. it totally wasn't because you were sick; that is just preposterous!

this graph is more generalized for life, as opposed to the snapshot labeling that i have been doing on this post. however, this is still a bit interested. in general, i qualify toward the phlegmatic side of things.

Now, why did this idea of me being in a bad mood lead to me thinking of an inbalance of my humors? and also, why did i  assume it was my blood first off?

to answer the second, i would think that blood is the most commonly known still, although admittedly i did not know the different meanings of each. unfortunately, i cannot seem to find a reason as to why these are still known, considering they have been thoroughly denounced by modern medicine and philosophy of the day does not hold these theories in high favor. I do know they still teach these in select history classes, so i might have picked up the phrase there, but my disdain for history makes that seem unlikely. I guess this will just remain a mystery, due to my laziness of researching it. :)


So that was my delving into it. I would go into the history of cultures believing in them, and how they went out of favor over the years, but i am not a history buff, so that stuff is kinda boring to me. i do however, hope i inspired you to look it up for yourself.