In the Europe 1 program "Historically yours", Stéphane Bern looks every day at the roots of an everyday expression.
Monday, he is interested in the origins of having "laziness", a phrase that comes to us, without too much haste, from the worst medical and scientific theories of the Middle Ages.
Stéphane Bern suggests every day, in
Historically yours
with Matthieu Noël, to discover these expressions that we use on a daily basis without necessarily knowing their origin. Monday, the host explains the roots of the expression, promise of procrastination, "to be lazy".
"Lazy. Everyone knows this sovereign urge to do absolutely nothing. But where does that word come from?" Lazy "is a recent expression, since it dates from the middle of the 20th century. But" lazy " ", with only one 'm', appears in the French language since 1874. A formula was then used, one spoke of a" drummer of laziness "to designate a lazy person. The French laziness comes from" flemma ", which meant in 16th century Italy "slowness" or "placidity".
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But laziness begins much earlier, in the 13th century.
Medically, we believed in the theory of moods.
For the scholars of medieval times, our body was composed of blood (which gave us joviality), black bile (which made us anxious), yellow bile (which made us be belligerent) and lymph, attached to the brain.
This last secretion was also called "phlegm" ... and it could make us listless!
From phlegm to laziness
We were therefore dependent on all these moods: too much lymph made us lymphatic, too much phlegm could make us, at best phlegmatic, at worst frankly flank ... Bloodletting was supposed to drive out bad moods, with catastrophic results that we know.
Instead, let's end with a smile and a nice word from the writer Robert Sabatier: "That laziness is one of the 7 deadly sins makes us seriously doubt the other 6". How right he is. "