The Rise of Obesity and Autobesity: From Medical Terms to Social Issues

Being fat is a disgrace. At least in the West and in the modern world. That’s why we like to hide obesity under the difficult medical concept obeeswhich, as so often with scientific terms, originally comes from Latin, where the basis is formed by the verb to obey, which means as much as overeating, eating too much. The derivative obesus stands for fat, full, the related obesity for overweight.

Obesity and obesity, although they appear incidentally in a fifteenth-century French text and in an English one a century later, remain for a long time exclusively in use by medical practitioners. Also the first time that the word obesity occurs in the Netherlands, it was used by a figure who called himself a physician. A traveling miracle doctor, who visited the markets of Maastricht and Rotterdam and advertised in the local newspapers that he knew the cure to lose weight, his liqueur l’Anti-Obesity.

Forms of excess weight

In Maastricht he did that in 1881 in French, because The Mail of the Meuse appeared in that language at the time, in the Rotterdam newspaper however, the quack reported in Dutch. After that, it was almost a century before the word appeared in a newspaper again. The well-known medical author Otto M. de Vaal discussed in 1975 in The parole some forms of overweight and its dangers. In his explanation he provided the correct medical terminology and thus mentioned obesity. It was not until the late 1980s that the word became commonplace. Not only in the Netherlands, but also in neighboring countries. The reason can be imagined, obesity had become a problem in our affluent society.

A new form of obesity has emerged in recent weeks: car visit, a combination of car and obesity, and therefore a confusing word. We often encounter car as a prefix for a foreign word in Dutch. In autonomous for example or in native. The first piece, car from the Greek autosmeans itself, noom comes from nomos and can be translated as manner, custom, or principle. A country that is autonomous governs itself in its own way. In native we recognize the Greek chtoon, country, so a native is someone who was born in the country itself. A autoimmune disease is a disease in which the immune system turns against its own body, so against yourself. An autobiography is a biography written by the main character.

In this line, autobesity seems to be one’s own obesity. But that’s not true. Car means something different here. It’s the car automotive, originally self-propelled, but in the meantime just a passenger car. Car ownership refers to fat cars. And a fat car, however much a status symbol, is as objectionable and shameful to third parties as fat men. That is why municipal authorities are now considering an obesity parking fee for such oversized vehicles. A autobees tax.

2023-07-23 13:00:01
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