Mind your language
DEPRESSION is all the rage at the moment. The papers are full of it. The other night my husband left his whisky glass on an open page in one of his medical magazines where there was an advertisement for a selective serotonin reuptake inhibitor with the trade name of Lustral (aka Sertraline). Who makes these names up? The ad showed a picture of an American train with its headlights on coming out of a rocky tunnel. What is that all about, pray?
The bit that I did understand made it all the stranger. I mean the word Lustral. In English it is an adjective to do with lustrum, a term taken straight from Latin. My little Cassell's dictionary is quite chatty about it: 'An expiatory sacrifice, offered every five years by the censors at the close of the census on behalf of the Roman people, at which an ox, sheep and sow were sacrificed.' I do not know if that made them less depressed, but the cloven-hoofed creatures of that day were no less susceptible to cattle plague than in our day, and, if the Roman nervousness about taking censuses (somehow a hubristic invasion of the deities' dispositions) was anything like the Hebrew (see I Chronicles, chapter 21), then sacrifice of domestic beasts was clearly a prudent gesture.
The luststem is etymologically connected with the Latin No (Greek iouo) 'I wash'; it is not like the lustin lustre, connected with lux; and certainly nothing to do with lust in English. Perhaps, though, the drug-namers had lust lurking in their cortices.
Lustrum, because of the regular occasion of its performance, came to mean a period of five years (or sometimes, confusingly, four). This was taken up in English usage, and lustral itself was also used as a noun with this meaning. Who can say whether this meaning lay behind the decision to give the name Lustral to a drug which apparently, if you continue to take it for six months after your severe depression lifts, is more helpful in preventing recurrence than a placebo? I should hope so too.
In America in the 19th century they took lustrum up in collegiate contexts, with the meaning of 'a five-year period' or even 'a group of four alumni', which is so stretched a development as to be pretty well catachrestic: not Ivy League standard. Perhaps that is where the American train came into the advertisement.
Dot Wordsworth
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