Welcome

My name is David Burrows and I am a freelance translator of Spanish into English. This blog contains some of my favourite words, a (mostly) amusing explanation of said words as well as some of my musings about translation. I hope you enjoy it.

Thursday 25 November 2010

Psychotic

Adjective - relating to, denoting or suffering from a psychosis
Noun - a person suffering from a psychosis.
Psychosis: Noun - a severe mental disorder in which thoughts or emotions are so impaired that contact is lost with external reality
Origin - from the Greek psukhosis 'animation', from psukhoo 'I give life to', from psukhe 'soul, mind.'
They thought he was cute. He knew he was psychotic.

One of the few words with not one but two silent consonants: the spelling of this word is enough to drive anyone psychotic. "What do you mean it starts with P? Who the hell put that H there? I'm losing contact with external reality! Aaaaah!"
Anyway, moving on. If you can get it right without losing too much of your sanity then you can see it for what it is: a nice looking and sounding word with a lot of power behind it. You have to be really crazy to qualify as psychotic. None of this "Ooo, look at me, I wear funny clothes, I'm a bit mad!", we are talking "Ooo look at me, I've just eaten a live rat and regularly bathe in old lemonade with my invisible friend, Timmy the antique spoon-maker." Or something along those lines (it's quite scary what I can come up with sometimes, perhaps I'm psychotic. At least that's what my fountain pen tells me.)

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