Humidity -- Oh, the Fun of It!

I have a new colleague who hails from northern California. She's a recent transplant to the D.C. region and everyone keeps warning her about what to expect during her first summer in the American South. Yes, D.C. is in the South, as much as folks here may wish to deny it, thinking themselves oh so cosmopolitan. (I remember when I was in high school in Birmingham, Ala. reading an article that noted "bama" was a slang term used in D.C. to denote a hick with no style. To which I say, bless their hearts, some of those D.C. denizens just can't seem to remember where that Mason-Dixon line runs.)

People who move to the South are given to fear humidity like brain-eating zombies or swine flu. Ok, yes, humidity feels yucky. Even us native Suth'ners cop to that. For those of you who've never experienced it, take a roll of cellophane and wrap yourself in it. The whole roll. From crown to toe. Once you're fully wrapped, have someone blow a hairdryer at you at full heat. While you're standing in a sauna. Now breathe.

Humidity in the Southern summer is that continuous clamminess that comes from hot, moisture-laden air through which you almost feel the need to push yourself with some amount of physical exertion. Fan blades turn slower in the South because the air is that much heavier. A glass of lemonade doesn't just sweat, it cries uncle 30 seconds after you take it out of the fridge.

Humid derives from a Latin term umere meaning "to be moist." It also relates to the medieval physiological term for the elements that, it was thought, determine personality, namely, the four humours. This concept fascinated me as a lit student when I was studying Chaucer and other middle English writers. Back then, people believed that their temperments were ruled by the balance of these humours in their bodies. Your level of blood (emanating from the liver -- so it was believed at the time -- and characterized by courageousness or amorousness), phlegm (secreted by the brain or lungs and associated with calmness or aloofness), yellow bile (stemming from the gall bladder and associated with anger and impulsiveness), and black bile (secreted by the spleen and linked to despondence and irritability) determined your outlook on life. Too much of one or the other explained why you were either melancholy, hot-headed, unflappable, or easily annoyed. I love the adjectives associated with each, pretty much still in use today (though not all in their original sense or usage): sanguine, phlegmatic, choleric and melancholic, respectively.

Nowadays, humour in its medieval sense of fluids is no more and humor means laughable or having a sense of what's funny. According to the Online Etymology Dictionary, the term humour led to the sense of "'mood, temporary state of mind' (first recorded 1525); the sense of 'amusing quality, funniness' is first recorded 1682, probably via sense of 'whim, caprice' (1565), which also produced the verb sense of 'indulge,' first attested 1588.... Humorous in the modern sense is first recorded 1705."

So the relationship between humidity and humorous is fractured. But if we Southerners couldn't make fun of all the Yankees wilting in the heat, what fun would we have?