agathokakological

That’s a mouthful, isn’t it? If something is agathokakological it means it’s made up of both good and evil. Think Spike from Buffy the Vampire Slayer or Darth Vader.

Photo by Jack Hamilton on Unsplash.

Agathokakological is a combo of the Greek roots agath- (which means good), kako- (which is a variant of cac-, and means, you’ve guessed it, bad) plus -logical (which is a suffix based on logos, meaning word). It was probably coined by Robert Southey, the least famous of the Lake Poets (Wordsworth and Coleridge being much more well known). Southey loved inventing words (the OED has him as the creator of almost 400) but, unlike other well-known word inventors, very few of his have survived to the modern day. This isn’t particularly surprising as several of them seem to be as hard to say/spell as agathokakological. Exhibit 1: batrachophagous which means ‘frog-eating’. What?

In 1813 Southey became poet laureate after being bigged up by his pal Sir Walter Scott (he of Ivanhoe and Rob Roy fame). Not because he was nice, but because Scott didn’t want to do it – he described it as a ‘poisoned chalice’ and said that previous holders had ‘churned out conventional and obsequious odes on royal occasions’. Ouch. In 1837, while being poet laureate and presumably churning out those crappy odes, Southey got a letter from a then-unknown young lady named Charlotte Brontë, asking for some advice on her poems. He praised Brontë’s writing but told her she shouldn’t give up the day job stating ‘Literature cannot be the business of a woman’s life…’. What a dick. And thank goodness she didn’t listen.

charisma

The excellently named Charisma Carpenter – yes, that is her real name – of Buffy the Vampire Slayer fame (photo credit: Gage Skidmore – also an excellent name)

Someone who’s charismatic is charming, attractive and often a little bit sexy. But you know that already. But did you know that ‘charisma’ actually has its roots in religion, specifically Christianity? It was only in the early 20th century that it came to have the little-bit-sexy meaning it has today.

‘Charisma’ originally comes from the Greek word ‘kharisma’ (so not much of a leap there) which means ‘favour freely given’ or ‘gift of grace’. Both the Hebrew and Christian Bibles talk about divinely conferred charisma, which is used to talk about someone who’s a favourite of him/her upstairs i.e. who’s received God’s favour. In English, from about 1640 onwards, people used ‘charisma’ to refer to a gift or power bestowed on someone by the Holy Spirit for the good of the church.

So where did the sexy come in? I’m afraid that’s a very unsexy story. German sociologist Max Weber came up with a new definition of charisma some time before 1920 (it was found in an unfinished manuscript after he died), which is generally regarded as having dragged the concept from theological obscurity into everyday use. He described it as:

“… a certain quality of an individual personality by virtue of which he is set apart from ordinary men and treated as endowed with supernatural, superhuman, or at least specifically exceptional powers or qualities. These as such are not accessible to the ordinary person …”