Nearly having written “acid,” I backtracked, recognizing that you, gentle reader, might assume I was talking about the drug. Alas I have zero interest thereof. I am instead thinking about bile, that is, irritability, prickliness; the quality of being pert, tetchy, sharp; snagging, spiky, abrupt in return. It is a quality that perches, seemingly by instinct, next to a choice. Something about the decisive choosing of “this, and not that,” however subtly, aggravates the glands to reject the unchosen.
Particularly in American business culture but in nearly all public life, the presence of bile is frowned upon. Any nastiness or criticality is taken to be evidence of faults in one’s nature, rather than of discernment or aesthetic. One quickly learns one must master the art of saying “no” without seeming to refuse.
The temperamental theory of personality is rooted in humourism, that is, the understanding of both physiological and somatic medicine, and human nature, to be governed by four humours: the fluids blood, phlegm, black bile, and yellow bile. Each of these humours derives from the fundamental qualities of matter that might be imagined as the axes of a 2x2: hot <-> cold, and wet <-> dry. Each humour occupies a place on this grid: blood is hot and wet, and corresponds with spring; phlegm is cold and wet, and corresponds with winter; black bile is cold and dry, and corresponds with autumn; yellow bile is hot and dry, and corresponds with summer.
Galen conceives of an individual’s temperament as a function of the mixture of these qualities, as instantiated by the mixture of the four humours within the physical body. “Temperament,” meaning “"proportioned mixture of elements,” derives from the Latin temperamentum, “proper mixture, a mixing in due proportion,” from temperare, “to mix in due proportion, modify, blend” (EtymOnline advises that the sense of habit of mind or disposition is from 1821). Per Galen, the ideal human temperaments evinced a balanced mixture of hot and cold, and wet and dry. The familiar typology refers to imbalances caused by excess of an offending humour, and the associated personality defects or physical symptoms thereof: sanguine, too much blood, causing happiness, high energy, mania, dysntery, nosebleeds; phlegmatic, too much phlegm, causing passivity, sluggishness, apathy, ennui, sneezing, colds; melancholic, too much black bile, causing introspection, sentimentality, moodiness, dry skin, vomiting; choleric, too much yellow bile, causing biliousness, anger, sharpness, fever, jaundice.
Both “melancholy” and “choleric” derive from the Greek χολή (kholḗ) meaning bile. A root of an alternative form of the word, χόλος (khólos) has cognates in Latin, Sanskrit, and Persian meaning, variously, “gold,” “tawny,” or “honey-yellow.”
Overabundance of the secreted gold, then, tips one toward the moodily mournful or to the irritable. I treasure bile and often wander after the sources of my own, long since suppressed.