humor

Before humor meant jokes, it meant wetness. Medieval doctors pictured the body as a little weather system, with blood, phlegm, yellow bile, and black bile sloshing around like the forces of nature, and if the mix was off, your personality was off too. That’s why a word for bodily fluid could drift into ‘mood’ by the 1520s and then into ‘funniness’ by the late 1600s: a capricious person was, in effect, ruled by his humors. Shakespeare had a field day with that idea, and the old medical theory lingered so stubbornly that the French still keep humeur and humour side by side like estranged cousins. So the next time a joke lands, remember: English is giggling with a word that once smelled faintly of clinic and rainwater.