Cacoethes Scribendi

Term: Cacoethes Scribendi
Method: Onomatopoeia

Cacoethes Scribendi, a term used in the late eighteenth century to attack female authorship, has an interesting provenance and suggests a contemporary parallel. In 1793, the Latin term was used to diagnose women who write as sufferers of a mental (scribendi) disease (cacoethes).

But more interestingly, the term appears to be an instance of onomatopoeia. Cacoethes resembles the sound that chickens make, itself an onomatopoeic sound — cackling; a sound that can be equally applied to the “babbling” (another onomatopoeic word) of so-called idiots. This was a particularly prevalent trope in the eighteenth-century and can be heard in Francisco de Goya’s 1794 painting titled “The Yard of a Madhouse” (also known as “The Madhouse at Saragosa”). Scribendi suggests another onomatopoeic word — scribbling (from the Latin scribere), the sound that a pen makes as it scratches ink into paper.

Thus writing, whether women’s or men’s, is a cackling of scribbles and thus a symptom of madness. Perhaps blogging should be termed taptapclick beependi?