I'm Minyon Fogarty and you can think of me as your friendly guide to the English language.

We talk about writing, history, rules, and cool stuff.

Today in honor of National Novel Writing Month, we'll talk about how to start your novel.

And then I'll help you remember the difference between the words hilarious and hysterical.

When you're rolling on the floor laughing, describe the joke as hilarious, not hysterical.

Hilarious means roughly super funny.

It comes from a Greek word meaning cheerful.

Pandas are hilarious.

I love to watch videos of them rolling downhill.

They make me laugh every time.

And if you listen to last week's episode about continuous versus continual, you'll note

that hilarious ends with the same OUS suffix we talked about at the end of continuous,

which means non-stop.

Panda videos are continuously hilarious, at least to me.

Historical means excited.

It comes from the same root as hysteria, from the Greek word meaning womb, coming from

the idea, her rump, that only women were emotionally excitable.

And I love this.

We also used to have the adjective hysteric in American English.

Here's an example of the Oxford English dictionary list from the novel The Thin Red Line.

He had had a strange hystericgy encounter with his clerk-fife on the march.

And some kinds of laughter truly can be hysterical.

...