NaBloPoMo Day 5

Venting My Spleen

No, I'm not going to vent it, I'm going to talk about it. It's an expression I like. I was skimming over some older posts from this year and in one of them I mentioned "relieving" or "venting" my spleen. Do you ever use that expression?

In ancient Greek medicine it was believed that there were four "humors" that determined behavior and emotion. They were Sanguine, Phlegmatic, Choleric, and Melancholic. The organ associated with the melancholic humor was the spleen and the qualities were cold and dry. I wonder if when Shakespeare wrote Petruchio saying of Katherine, "I'll tame her mad and headstrong humor," he was speaking of changing her from a hot and dry (choleric) humor to a cold and dry (melancholic) humor. That might fit. But why did the spleen change from symbolizing melancholy to anger? 

My first introduction to the phrase being used this way was when I began reading Georgette Heyer at about the age of sixteen. Heyer used a lot of historic slang, appropriate for the period she was writing about, and she used the phrase about venting one's spleen more than once. Back then you couldn't look up phrase origins on the Internet like you can today. But I was an avid reader with eclectic tastes, and at some point I came across a book where one of the characters believed in phrenology -- the

Victorian notion that one's character or natural tendencies could be told by "reading" the bumps on one's head. I brought this up in conversation with my elder sister, Barbara, who had an encyclopedic knowledge of obscure subjects, and during the discussion we covered not only phrenology but humors as well. She told me about the spleen being one of the sources of the humors, and we discussed venting the spleen meaning anger, which I knew it did by the context of what I was reading.

Now, of course, we have the Internet, so we can look up things like this.  One of my favorite websites is The Word Detective, and he says of the phrase, "The spleen's job is to act as a sort of filter for the blood, but in medieval times, when each bodily organ was thought to be the home of one emotion or another, the spleen was regarded as the seat of melancholy.... There was apparently a brief period later on when the spleen was suspected, improbably, of supplying humor and good cheer, but by the late 16th century it was decided that the spleen was the source of rage and ill-temper. Thus 'spleen' has for several centuries been a metaphor for 'anger,' 'resentment' and general crankiness."

And it was my general crankiness of which I was relieving myself in the earlier mentioned older blog post. I don't "vent my spleen" too often, though. Aren't you glad? :)

Ta for now,

~~ Lori