'Oracles of Mirth'

How nice to have a poet teach me a new word: gelomancy. You won’t find it in the OED. It’s the title of a poem by Deborah Warren collected in Connoisseurs of Worms (Paul Dry, 2021). The subtitle is the word’s definition: “divination based on the interpretation of laughter.” Here is “Gelomancy”: 

“The world, in the pressure of creation--

atoms at its core colliding--

shook with their reverberations,

shuddered its surface into fissures,

split its sides, and laughed

And where the laughter left a grotto,

crouches a hag who drinks the sulfide

in a volcanic draft.

 

“To her interpreters she utters

truth: The sulphur-priestess squats

and, sucking from the earth

its cold upseeping exhalations,

babbles her intoxication

burped out into cacchinations--

croons and chuckles up the future--

oracles of mirth.”

 

In her prose work Strange to Say: Etymology as Serious Entertainment (Paul Dry, 2021), Warren titles a chapter “Too Funny for Words: Laughter,” in which she dismisses the word joyologist coined by a “laugh instructor.” It “mixes the Romance gioia with the Greek -ology.” She goes on: “I’d prefer some such word as geliology. Gelomancy, divination by laughter, passes muster: Greek manteia means divination and brings us the praying mantis.”

 

The Greek gelo- (laugh, laughter) has spawned numerous laugh-related word in English. Gelasmus and gelasma: insane or hysterical spasmodic laughter (See: Jerry Lewis). Geloscopy: fortune-telling by means of laughter. An agelast is someone who never laughs (See: Noam Chomsky). Dacrygelosis: alternating between crying and laughing (See: life). I’m reminded of a phrase by Max Beerbohm in the Ur-text on the subject, “Laughter” (And Even More, 1920): “. . . to die of laughter--this, too, seems to me a great euthanasia . . .”