Good day to you, kind linguists, and welcome to another round of An Assemblage of Grandiose and Bombastic Grandiloquents. Now - some of you may identify with today’s word, and others will not. But I ask you to strap yourselves in, and join with me as we examine today’s word: misogamy.
‘Misogamy’, simply put, is the hatred of marriage. It’s a word from the 1650s, from the Modern Latin ‘misogamia’, which in turn is from the Greek ‘misogamos’ meaning ‘hating marriage’. If we delve further into the Greek etymology, we see that ‘misos’ means ‘hate’ and ‘gamos’ meaning ‘marriage’. You might recognise the words ‘polygamy’ or ‘monogamy’ which mean ‘the practice or custom of having more than one wife or husband at the same time’ and ‘the practice of marrying or state of being married to one person at a time’ respectively. Fascinatingly, the usage for ‘misogamy’ peaked in 1989, with a steep fall from 1997 to 1998. I honestly couldn’t tell you why, honest listener, nor do we have the time to unpack the popularity and use of words in the late 1900s, so we’ll just go with it.
The idea of misogamy was important in the Christian church during the medieval period as a prerequisite for the celibacy required to occupy the highest positions in the church. It was developed in the philosophy of the Greek Philosopher Theophrastus, the successor to Aristotle in the Peripatetic school, who became the ‘canonical authority on philosophic misogamy throughout the Middle Ages’.
There is a quote from the prolific English writer Fergus Hume’s work, ‘The Harlequin Opal, Volume 1’ that reads, ‘Philip, the cynic, enjoyed it greatly, thereby proving that a considerable portion of his misogamy was humbug.’ I think that pretty much sums it up.
Isn’t language wonderful?
Written by Taylor Davidson, Read by Zane C Weber
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