Phrase of the day: cacoëthes scribendi

I found it Jean Stafford’s Collected Stories (1969), in the “Author’s note,” where Stafford writes briefly of the two principal books of her childhood, one by her father, the other by a first cousin once removed. Stafford never read either book:

However, their titles influenced me when my cacoëthes scribendi set in and I wrote about twisters on the plains, stampedes when herds of longhorns were being driven up from the Panhandle to Dodge, and bloody incidents south of the border.

Merriam-Webster has it: “an uncontrollable urge to write.” Cacoëthes has an interesting past:

borrowed from Latin cacoēthes “malignant tumor at an early stage, disease of character,” borrowed from Greek kakóēthes “malignancy, wickedness,” noun derivative from neuter of kakoḗthēs “ill-disposed, malicious, (of things) abominable, (of tumors, fevers, etc.) malignant,” from kako- CACO- + -ēthēs, adjective derivative of êthos “custom, disposition, character” — more at ETHOS.

And there’s a note:

Use of the word in the sense “insatiable desire” is largely dependent on an oft-quoted line by the Roman satirist Juvenal: “tenet insanabile multos scribendi cacoethes” (“the incurable disease of writing takes hold of many”).

The phrase appears in Juvenal’s seventh satire: “Tenet insanabile multos / Scribendi cacoethes et aegro in corde senescit” [An inveterate and incurable itch for writing besets many, and grows old in their sick hearts].

Cacoëthes reminds me of other bad words: cacophony, of course, but also cacography (bad handwriting, bad spelling), cacology (bad diction or pronunciation), and kakistocracy (government by the worst people). Kakistos is the Greek superlative.

[Latin from The Perseus Project. English translation from Bartlett’s Familiar Quotations (2002).]