Greetings all of you verbiage affectionados! The word we are examining today is a very pleasant word. Both to hear, and to say, and, by definition to experience for oneself. Or perhaps, it would paradoxically be more correct to say - suffer for oneself. Today we are talking about ‘habromania’, the simple definition of which is “a form of delusional insanity in which the imaginings assume a cheerful or joyous character”.
Now, this is a very old word that is not often used today but, to my knowledge doesn’t have an adequate replacement. So, without further ado let us proceed with the easiest of ‘habromania’s’ two root words to track, ‘mania’.
‘Mania’ can be used to describe a passion in the zeitgeist, what we might now refer to as a fad. Such as in the sentence, “Du Bellay did not actually introduce the sonnet into French poetry, but he acclimatized it; and when the fashion of sonneteering became a mania he was one of the first to ridicule its excesses.”
However, the form we are interested in is the ‘mania’ that has been used since around the 1500s as the second element in compounds expressing particular types of madness; such as ‘nymphomania’, ‘kleptomania’, ‘megalomania’, and our good friend ‘habromania’.
In the modern form the word ‘mania’ means "mental derangement characterized by excitement and delusion,". This stems from the Late Latin ‘mania’ meaning "insanity, madness," itself from the Greek ‘mania’ "madness, frenzy; enthusiasm, inspired frenzy; mad passion, fury,".
And now the more difficult part, ‘habro’. The closest to a meaning of this root I can find is the modern meaning of the word in the field of Zoology; that of ‘graceful’. And that is it. Simply, ‘graceful’.
If we want to get creative we might want to then define ‘habromania’ as being a ‘graceful insanity’, which when compared to things such as ‘megalomania’ might not be as untrue as on first inspection.
Isn’t language wonderful?
Written by Taylor Davidson, Read by Zane C Weber
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