story. It comes to us from the Latin word _humor_,
which means a "fluid" or "liquid." By "humour" we now mean either
"temper," as when we speak of being in a "good" or "bad" humour, or
that quality in a person which makes him very quick to find "fun" in
things. And from the first meaning of "temper" we have the verb "to
humour," by which we mean to give in to or indulge a person's whims.
But in the Middle Ages "humour" was a word used by writers on
philosophy to describe the four liquids which they believed (like the
Greek philosophers) that the human body contained. These four
"humours" were blood, phlegm, yellow bile (or choler), and black bile
(or melancholy). According to the balance of these humours a man's
character showed itself. From this belief we get the adjectives--which
we still use without any thought of their origin--_sanguine_
("hopeful"), _phlegmatic_ ("indifferent and not easily excited"),
_choleric_ ("easily roused to anger"), and _melancholy_ ("inclined to
sadness"). A person had these various temperaments according as the
amount of blood, phlegm, yellow or black bile was uppermost in his
composition. From the idea that having too much of any of the
"humours" would make a person diseased or odd in character, we got the
use of the word _humours_ to describe odd and queer things; and from
this it came to have its modern meaning, which takes us very far from
the original Latin.

It was from this same curious idea of the formation of the human body
that we get two different uses of the word _temper_. _Temper_ was
originally the word used to describe the right mixture of the four
"humours." From this we got the words _good-tempered_ and
_bad-tempered_. Perhaps because it is natural to notice more when
people are bad-tempered rather than good, not more than a hundred
years ago the word _temper_ came to mean in one use "bad temper." For
this is what we mean when we say we "give way to temper." But we have
the original sense of "good temper" in the expression to "keep one's
temper." So here we have the same word meaning two opposite things.

Several words which used to have a meaning connected with religion
have now come to have a more general meaning which seems very
different from the original. A word of this sort in English is
_order_, which came through the French word _ordre_, from the Latin
_ordo_. Though the Latin word had the meaning which we now give to the
word _order_, in the English of the thirt