For those who’ve been elsewhere of late, we’re batting around
the possibility of coming up with a more striking name for the mental disorder known as “clinical depression.” One reader wrote to remind us that Winston Churchill referred to his own depression as “the black dog,” and a couple of classicists obligingly translated that homely phrase into resonantly medical-sounding Latin.
Now my brother writes:
The phrase you wrote about a few days ago, “black dog”: Truckers use that term when they have been on the road, usually past their legal hours, too long. It’s when you start to haze over and the white line dashes start to take on the appearence of two eyes in the head of a black dog. Patrick Swayze starred in a movie with the same title.
I think we may be onto something here….