 Bethlem Royal Hospital, aka Bedlam |
With my thoracic surgery staring at me from the other side of the weekend, I decided that grabbing something from the past and emending it would be easier than writing something totally new. So I did. This is from May 25, 2008.
I am intensely interested in how words have come to mean what they do. Since words are all I have to argue for my inclusion into human society, how could I not need to be interested in those long forgotten thought processes.
With help from the Online Etymological Dictionary and its many contributors, I do the research so you don’t have to.
Insanity – 1432, (referring to health of body, or rather lack thereof), deriving from Latin sanus (health)
Interesting question:
Why insane? Why not unsane? Nonsane? Presane or postsane?
Protosane?
insane – 1560, mad, outrageous, excessive, extravagant
sanity – 1602
sane – 1721 (back-created from sanity, which was back-created from insanity.)