Two book-related words today. I'm going to start with something you really don't want in your life, that's libel in any kind. That is a written defamatory statement about you or information about you, as opposed to slander, which is always spoken. Libel goes back to the Latin "libellus", which meant a little book. "Liber" was a book, it gave us library, too. That just what it was originally. It was a very short essey or a treatise on some praticular subject, but it move onto encompass a leaflet or a pamphlet that was a circulated to lots and lots of people. Because of political pressures of the day, very often they would contain quite vehement and agressive attacks on the government and they were often defamatory. So defamatory in fact, that that's where we got, from libellus, that little book, the idea of libel. I mentioned a pamphlet that was distributed around, and I love the story of pamphlet, because it's so far removed from the meaning it has today. Not all of us will appreciate the pamphlets popping through our letterebox most days, but it originated in the late 1300s, it's very, very old. It meant again a small treatise or another work, consisting of pages without covers. But its origin is quite wonderful. It comes from Pamphilet, which was a French title of a completely anonymus but extremely popular 12th-century comic love poem. It was written in Latin - Pamphilus, seu de Amore, or Pamphilus on love. Pamphilus was the name of the hero, who got his name from Pamphilus, maning "beloved by all" in Greek. Don't quite know the subject of the poem, but I do know it was insredibly popular. Pamphilus then produced Pamphilet, a little edition of Pamphilus, if you like. As I say, it was so popular, it was widely copied and passed around from person to person in a form of a very thin leaflet. So from that hero of an extremely popular love poem, we get a very prosaic word pamphlet today.
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