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Dear Logophiles ------------
I an looking for two words:
1) I am looking for the technical term for a word that combines both Greek and Latin elements. The term I am looking for is *not* macaronic, which is usually applied to verse or prose texts, and is not specific to the Latin/Greek melding within a single word.
2) I am looking for the technical medical term that is the male-specific equivalent for the female-specific term "hysteria".
Many thanks for your help!
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>>am looking for the technical medical term that is the male-specific equivalent for the female-specific term "hysteria"<<
I believe this might be tricky, due to the gender specific origins of the term, syndrome, and procedures enacted to cure it.
I heard an academic read a paper on the radio, though, who referred to radio talk back hosts as "male hysterics" and encouraged others to appropriate the term. I'll ask someone I know who is researching "hysteria", may take a few days.
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<male-specific equivalent for the female-specific term "hysteria">
with a straight face -- perhaps 'histeria'?
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Carpal Tunnel
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>the male-specific equivalent for the female-specific term "hysteria"
In psychiatry, hysteria is not viewed as being female specific, according to two friends of mine who have long background in the field. There are two definitions, the "medical" one being:
A neurosis marked by conversion symptoms, a calm mental attitude and episodes of hallucinations, somnambulism, amnesia and other mental aberrations.
The "non-medical" definition is:
Excessive or uncontrollable emotion, as panic or fear.
Note the term calm mental attitude in the first definition, which is antithetical to the second.
Sandra and Mark, who between them have somewhere around 50 years in the mental health field, assure me that true hysteria (the first definition) is no more prevalent among females than is the common cold. Neither one is aware of a male-specifc word.
And I can assure you from my 10 years in a rescue squad that the common hysteria (second definition) is just as probable among males as among females.
TEd
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but, in the words of Merriam-Webster, hysteria is "from Greek hysterikos, from hystera womb; from the Greek notion that hysteria was peculiar to women and caused by disturbances of the uterus. therefore some feel this to be a grievous gap in our language. Paul Dickson suggests tarassis as the "male equivalent", without explanation. I have no clue, but perhaps it also has some basis in Greek?
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>some feel this to be a grievous gap in our language. Paul Dickson suggests tarassis
Who are these "some" people??
Hysteria is a perfectly good word for a well-understood medical condition that affects men and women equally. I have good advice for "some": GET A LIFE! And who the heck is Paul Dickson??
Tarassis? Hmmm. I think Scarlett may have been an only child, but there was a younger girl around right at the beginning of the movie.
TEd
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>who are these "some" people?
evidently our interrogator and Paul Dickson are two; Dickson is the author of several books on words and such, of which "Dickson's Word Treasury : A Connoisseur's Collection of Old and New, Weird and Wonderful, Useful and Outlandish Words" is the one wherein he suggests 'tarassis'. I gather that you would construe this word to fall into the latter-most category....
Dickson has also written several humor anthologies, some of which include collections of shaggy dog stories.
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Masterson,
She got back to me with a few words of the subject, I'll paste them here: "hysteria comes from the greek meaning 'womb' so yes it has a female etymology. there was a belief in ancient times that the womb did not stay fixed but roamed around in women's bodies and caused them all sorts of trouble. threads of this opinion still surface today. and there certainly was a kind of rampant (some would say hysterical) kind of mythology about the link between the womb and its removal being the equivalent of women's madness and their sanity.
However, many would argue that men can be hysterical, or suffer from hysteria. There are various old case studies of men developing such things as 'hysterical pregnancies' or phantom limbs, etc. in their distress. This is particularly so if you view hysteria as not naturally tied to sex but a by-product of gender conditioning and a sense of powerlessness. From what I recall Freud did see hysteria as the female neurosis par excellence and obsession as its masculine equivalent. It is also interesting to note that a Lacanian Jacques Alain-Miller suggests that the there is a hysterical moment in the cure of obsessive behaviours so that the two are not entirely separable
Freud did not really discover hysteria (it has its origins on Egyptian papyri!) but he did give it credibility (and a pathology), as it formed the cornerstone of his 'new science' psychoanalysis. His patient, Ida Bauer, he called "Dora" (a name which he gave to her, and was the name of his sister's maid) in his case study called "Fragment of an Analysis of a Case of Hysteria (Dora)"."
I realise this didn't actually help you to find a new word. I found looking up "hysteria" rather interesting, as it seemed to excavatea couple of thousand years of attitudes towards 1)gender, 2)madness and 3)the "discovery/invention" of the unconscious mind, which has so influenced contemporary thinking/assumptions about the mind (which strikes me as playing a role which used to be occupied by the concept of "satanic infestation" in Western cultures.)
Thank you for your post, as I enjoyed what it unearthed.
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