lalochezia
lall-owe-kee-zee-uh
noun
The use of foul language to relieve stress
Anyone who has been in a meeting with me for longer than a few minutes will know that I love to swear. There is a great catharsis in swearing, and sometimes only a four-letter word will do the trick.
There is some research to suggest that swearing can increase your pain tolerance by almost a third, with a particularly potent effect in people who don’t swear particularly often. There is also, of course, ample anecdotal evidence that suggests that swearing makes you feel better.
Enter ‘lalochezia’. There is a debate to be had about the extent to which ‘lalochezia’ qualifies as a word, since it is not listed in any dictionaries, and seems to exist solely in the realm of ‘Aren’t words fun?’-style blogs like this one. I suppose, a bit like the stock market, if we all pretend it exists, it will.
Anyway, ‘lalochezia’ is Greek in origin. The first part, ‘lalo-’ means ‘to speak’ or ‘to make a sound’ and appears most commonly in specific medical vocabulary for speech disorders. ‘Echolalia’, for instance, refers to repetition of someone else’s speech. ‘Glossolalia’, while not a medical term, is the technical term for ‘speaking in tongues’. ‘-chezia’, also found in highfalutin medical jargon, literally means ‘defecation’. ‘Hematochezia’ refers to having blood in one’s stool. So, etymologically, ‘lalochezia’ means ‘talking sh*t’. There’s a beauty in that somewhere.
Since the word is not listed in any dictionaries it is hard to say when it first entered the English language. A cursory search of Google would seem to suggest some time in the early 1970s, with a peak in usage around the year 2012. Time to bring it back, I say.
Final fun fact on the note of swearing: if you’ve ever seen typographical symbols used to represent swear words - ‘Oh &@!# off!’ - these are known as ‘grawlixes’.