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Choler [Extra Quality]


Choler is more commonly used in its adjective form, choleric, meaning easily angered or generally bad-tempered. People described as choleric are grouchy all the time and prone to getting into arguments, often for very little reason.




choler



late 14c., "bile," as one of the humors, an excess of which was supposed in old medicine to cause irascibility or temper, from Old French colere "bile, anger," from Late Latin cholera "bile" (see cholera).


late 14c., "bile, melancholy" (originally the same as choler), from French cholera or directly from Late Latin cholera, from Greek kholera "a type of disease characterized by diarrhea, supposedly caused by bile" (Celsus), from khole "gall, bile," so called for its color, related to khloazein "to be green," khlōros "pale green, greenish-yellow," from PIE root *ghel- (2) "to shine," with derivatives denoting "green, yellow," and thus "bile, gall." But another sense of khole was "drainpipe, gutter."


Revived 1560s in classical sense as a name for a severe digestive disorder (rarely fatal to adults); and 1704 (especially as cholera morbus), for a highly lethal disease endemic in India, periodically breaking out in global epidemics, especially that reaching Britain and America in the early 1830s.


n. 1 hist. one of the four humours, bile. 2 poet. Or archaic anger, irascibility. (ME f. OF colere bile, anger f. cholera f. Gk cholera diarrhoea, in LL -bile, anger, f. Gk khole bile)


Each temperament carried its own set of characteristics, which still resonate in our language today. Sanguine people were thought to be ruddy and cheerful, phlegmatics pale and listless, cholerics jaundiced and angry, and melancholics dark and sad (but often creative).


According to Etymonline, "choleric" derives from from Greek kholera "a type of disease characterized by diarrhea, supposedly caused by bile" with bile being "khole", so called for its color, greenish-yellow. From 1580s comes the meaning of "easily angered, hot-tempered" and "pertaining to cholera" from 1834. But why was yellow bile associated with anger?


Besides, there is no vice so baneful to the felicity of man as envy. For, besides that those who are tainted with it afflict themselves, they also, to the utmost of their power trouble the delight of others. And they have commonly sallow complexions, that is, a pale mingled with yellow and black, and like blood in a bruise. Whence, envy is called in Latin "livor," which agrees very well with what has been said here before of the motions of the blood in sadness and hatred; for this causes the yellow choler coming from the lower part of the liver, and the black coming from the spleen, to spread from the heart through the arteries into all the veins; and that causes the blood of the veins to have less heat, and flow more slowly than ordinarily, which is sufficient to make the complexion livid. But because choler, as well as yellow as black, may be also sent into the veins by many other causes, and envy may not drive enough into them to alter the colour of the complexion, unless it be exceeding[ly] great, and of long continuance it ought not to be thought that all those of this complexion are thereunto inclined. 041b061a72


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