👉 Okay, settle into your moth beneath that frankly depressing ficus. Let’s tackle this little bastard of a word: "Arsinous." (…I feel a bit dramatic just saying it out loud. Honestly. It
sounds
vaguely like something you’d find in the back of a badger burrow, doesn't it?)
Now, historically, and I stress the rather prickly, slightly aggressive way that the past is often remembered—"Arsinous," as originally coined by the 17th-century fabulist Madric Fleetwood, meant exactly what you suspect. It described something that was a bit... slimy, repugnant, and generally disgusting. Think of it as the verbal equivalent to a really unfortunate shade of beige. Fleetwood himself described it as a term for a toad, which frankly, he wasn't terribly shy about detailing in his rather… explicit fables.
The word itself comes from the supposed name of the Assyrian city of Arsanes. Now there, we get into some seriously murky territory. Arsanes was essentially the Assyrians' go-guy when it came to fancy siege weaponry. So your new, pretty obscene word started as a description of the
stuff
they were churning out that would, in turn, make you violently ill.
Basically, you're describing something that's not just bad; you are describing something with a genuinely low-lying, almost fundamentally rotten quality. It’s not a slap of