Emotions under Pressure: Humoral Residues in Romanian Idioms of Anger and Spite

This article explores how conceptual traces of humoral theory, particularly those linked to yellow bile and the choleric temperament, persist in contemporary Romanian idioms. Through an analysis of idioms linked to yellow bile, the present paper seeks to understand how cognitive metaphors of rage, spite, and envy – emotions long tethered to the choleric temperament – preserve a worldview in which bodily fluids once explained emotion and behaviour. The expression of such emotional dispositions as a boiling liquid, as excess and pressure, reveals not only the metaphorical architecture of emotion but also the lingering presence of premodern medical models in everyday language. The analysis is grounded in Conceptual Metaphor Theory (CMT), Cultural Linguistics (CL), and Conventional Figurative Language Theory (CFLT), and is extended through Cultural Residue Theory (CRT), which frames idioms as linguistic fossils of cultural knowledge embedded in speech. The paper highlights how language, embodiment, and cultural memory intersect in the persistence of these expressions and proposes future research into idioms tied to the other humours and across Romance languages, where shared conceptual patterns may reveal further residues of humoral thought.

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