culture Root awakening

There are some deep, deep prejudices hidden in everyday words that we still casually use. Amid an effort to weed out some of these, researchers are spotlighting their troubling origins. Can you spot the problems, to begin with, with the four terms below?

- Gowri S

(Gowri S)

Some English words seem to make no sense, until one realises that, in a sinister way, they do; their dark roots largely hidden, but visible with a bit of digging.

Extreme prejudice, for instance, gave us “hysteria”, “gypped” and even “tipping point”. The misogyny inherent in “hysteria” can be traced all the way back to ancient Greece.

Hippocratic theory stated that a type of hystera (Greek for uterus) called the “wandering womb” moved around the body looking for sperm, disrupting other organs in the process. This condition was thought to be particularly prevalent among unmarried women, and thought to cause strange behaviour. So, symptoms ranging from “excessive” emotion and irritability to anxiety, breathlessness and fainting spells were all diagnosed as “hysteria”.

The prescription generally involved marriage, and child-bearing.

This approach to emotional distress in women lasted about 2,500 years. As recently as the 20th century, hysteria was still diagnosed only in women, and was widely used to explain away almost any kind of unrest.

“Treatment” evolved, and sometimes included the removal of the uterus. From this, we get the term “hysterectomy”.

It was only in 1980 that hysteria was removed from the American Psychiatric Association's Diagnostic and Statistical Manual of Mental Disorders (DSM), which guides such treatment around the world.