I shouldn't blog when I'm tired. It's been a long week with several personal and financial setbacks, and that induces a state of melancholy. I had to look up melancholy in Webster's New World Dictionary to spell it correctly. Originally, the word meant "black bile. In medieval times, it was considered to be one of the four humors of the body, to come from the spleen or kidneys, and to cause gloominess, irritability, or depression."
Naturally then I got curious and had to know what the four humors were. It turned out they were blood, phlegm, choler and melancholy. Blood, I knew what that was as well as phlegm, and we just looked up melancholy. But choler? It was yellow bile and was the source of anger and ill humor. I went back to see what blood was the source of: passion, temperament or disposition. Phlegm supposedly was the source of sluggishness or dullness.
That pretty much exhausted the humors, but on the same page in dictionary as phlegm was phoenix. The myth of the phoenix came from Egypt. It supposedly is a beautiful lone bird which lives in the Arabian desert for 500 or 600 years and then sets itself on fire, rising renewed from the ashes to start another long life.
Not a bad metaphor for taking defeats. Although I'm not sure how to translate setting myself on fire into a metaphor. I'll leave that for someone else.
Flipping through the dictionary at random, I found embrocate. It means to moisten and rub a part of the body with oil or liniment. Right above embrocate was embrasure, which made me think of women's underwear, but turns out to be an opening for a door or window, especially one with the sides slanted so that it is wider on the inside than on the outside or an opening in a wall or parapet with the sides slides slanting outward to increase the angle of fire of a gun. I've seen windows like that in the movies. Now I know what they are. And you do, too.
It's good day, they say, when you learn something new. They may have suffered from diminished expectations.
Good night and have a great tomorrow.
3 comments:
Wow, I do feel more enlightened. :)
Me too.
I love the dictionary, however. I think m-w.com is one of my most visited links.
The definition of embrasure, however, is very metaphoric. Well if you think about it anyway. Er..um, yeah. Why did that strike me as weird?
It's Friday. I really need this weekend. :P
I made roughly the same comment that Amber made, because I stupidly didn't read the comments first. So, I deleted what I wrote. Only I couldn't remember any of the personality types except phlegmatic. I think that is one half of mine, and the other half is melancholic. But I don't remember so I may be wrong.
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