Veisalgia: Medical Term for Hangover at Bill Casselman's Canadian Word of the Day & Words of the World

As the booze-befuddled bashes of midwinter whoop-up approach, a fancy word for hangover may come in handy, should one have to resort to circumlocution when describing, for example, the state of Aunt Tiffany after five martinis. One hesitates to say, “Tiffy is squiffy, pissed as a newt, stiff as a fresh-boiled owl.” Auntie’s family will better appreciate some periphrastic evasion of a pseudo-medical hue, such as “My aunt is sufficiently veisalgic as to require a taxicab.” When little Rodney pipes up, “You mean, require a hearse!” the wee lad may be chastised repeatedly with a large candy cane.

Whatever befalls, here’s an English medical word new in the 21th century. Veisalgia is a hangover. The neology was coined in an article by Jeffrey G. Wiese, Michael G. Shlipak and Warren S. Browner in the professional journal Annals of Internal Medicine, June 6, 2000, vol. 132, no. 11, pages 897-902.

A Horrid Hybrid!

Seven years after its initial use, veisalgia is fairly widely used in popular medical websites and household medical advice books. It is not yet listed in the Oxford Dictionary online and has met a modicum of resistance from academic doctors and journal editors, principally, I suspect, because the word is a hybrid, that is, not made from all Latin or all Greek word roots. These are the same fussbudgets who criticized the word television when it was coined early in the 20th century, because it was half Greek and half Latin. The horror! The horror! Tele means ‘far’ in Greek and visio Latin ‘seeing.’ One supposes those critics would have approved some tongue-torqueing monstrosity like distantovision.

Post Coitum

The authors who made this new medical term state that the first syllable of veisalgia derives from the Norwegian language where kveis is a term signifying the “uneasiness following debauchery.” But kveis, say etymological purists, is not an apt component, because the word does not always mean ‘hangover.’ Kveis may denote postcoital tristesse, that glum sensory depletion following intercourse. My coital phrase is based on the old Latin maxim: post coitum omne animal triste est, praeter mulierem gallumque ‘after intercourse, every animal is sad except women and roosters.’ There is no extant evidence as to which ancient sage determined the veracity of the Latin statement, nor is there mention of an ancient Roman S.P.C.R. (Society for the Prevention of Cruelty to Roosters).

Since one of the neologists credited with veisalgia’s creation is named Wiese, I'm wondering if the word was even seriously presented in the paper. Perhaps it was a mere verbal jeu d'esprit, a punnish trifle, that has been taken up and transformed by use into a serious synonym for hangover. Odder things have happened in word history.

Real Norwegians Get Toemmermenn

Also, kveis is not the common Norwegian way of expressing ‘hangover.’ Much more colloquial and zesty are toemmermenn. If a good citizen of Norway has imbibed too much Linie Aquavit and is plastered to the gills and feeling no pain, he is said to have toemmermenn or ‘lumberjacks’ pounding their axes on the tender dendrites and axons of his brain cells.

-Algia What a Pain!

The second component of veisalgia is much commoner and has many instances in medical jargon. Algos is one of the Greek words for pain, and –algia is a frequent terminal in medical words describing various pains. Consider neuralgia ‘nerve pain’ or, the one I use the most, pygalgia ‘pain in the ass.’

The root appears in the word analgesic ‘a painkiller drug or remedy’ from Greek a- ‘not’ (sometimes called alpha privative because it negatizes the word it prefixes)+ n (sometimes called “nu euphonic” an n-sound added to the interior of words to make the word elements sound together more easily) + algesia ‘feeling pain’ (from earlier Greek algos ‘pain’).

The ‘Return Home’ of Greeks

The most familiar English word with the root is nostalgia. In ancient Greek nostos νόστος meant ‘a return home.’ Homecoming is the principal theme of the greatest ancient Greek story, The Odyssey. The Trojan War is over and Odysseus fights to journey home. Curiously enough, the word nostalgia itself was not conceived by the ancient Greeks. Nostalgia is a loan-translation from the German word Heimweh ‘painful longing for home, homesickness.’ Johannes Hofer, a Swiss medical student, coined nostalgia in 1688 in a paper entitled Dissertatio Medica de Nostalgia, oder Heimwehe ‘a medical treatise concerning Nostalgia or Homesickness.’

Nostos plays a huge part in modern Greek tourism which strives, among other goals, to get as many foreign-born Greeks as possible to visit their ancestral homeland. Hence the plethora of hotels and pensions and beach shacks featuring the word Nostos in their titles.

Now, as we stagger to the close of this hangover column, a modest headband of hangovers in other languages:

Dansk (Danish)
n. - tømmermænd, rest, levn

Nederlands (Dutch)
kater, ontnuchtering, overblijfsel, overlevering

Français (French)
n. - gueule de bois, (fig) héritage (de)

Deutsch (German)
n. – Kater

Ελληνική (Greek)
n. - πονοκέφαλος από οινοποσία

Italiano (Italian)
postumi di sbornia

Português (Portuguese)
n. - ressaca (f), sobra (f)

Русский (Russian)
похмелье, пережиток, наследие прошлого

Español (Spanish)
n. - resaca (después de una borrachera), remanente

Svenska (Swedish)
n. - baksmälla, kvarleva

中文（简体） (Chinese (Simplified))
残留物, 宿醉, 遗物

中文（繁體） (Chinese (Traditional))
n. - 殘留物, 宿醉, 遺物

日本語 (Japanese)
n. - 二日酔い, 遺物

العربيه (Arabic)
‏(الاسم) أثر متخلف أو عادة متخلفه من الماضي, الآثار البغيضه التي يخلفها في المرء في صباح اليوم التالي إسرافه في الشراب, الشراب في الليله السابقه‏

עברית (Hebrew)
n. - שארית, שרידים, זנבת הסביאה, כאב ראש לאחר שתייה

One Locus Classicus of Hangover in English Literature

British novelist Kingsley Amis wrote one of the most verisimilar passages describing a hangover in his humorous 1954 novel Lucky Jim:

“He lay sprawled, too wicked to move, spewed up like a broken spider-crab on the tarry shingle of the morning. The light did him harm, but not as much as looking at things did; he resolved, having done it once, never to move his eyeballs again. A dusty thudding in his head made the scene before him beat like a pulse. His mouth had been used as a latrine by some small creature of the night, and then as its mausoleum. During the night too, he'd somehow been on a cross-country run and then been expertly beaten up by secret police. He felt bad.”

If you drink, don’t drive this holiday season.

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