Holloween

I tend to wake up in the wee hours from the pain, and it is always a quiet, introspective time. Due to circumstances, I stay downstairs in my home hospital bed, while my wife and son sleep in the upstairs bedrooms.

The house is quiet. My cat is snoozing by my side. I do a few puffs of my medical cannabis, and if I'm lucky, I might catch an old episode of Sea Hunt.

My mind wanders. I experiment with thoughts. I play with words a lot.

This morning, I thought about the word Draconian. What a great Halloween word, Drac-onian. Oooh. The Universal monster movies - Frankenstein, the Wolfman, and of course, the psycho-sexual creature of the undead, Bela Lugosi's Dracula.

Dracula is a fictional character, created by Irish author, Bram Stoker, in his 1897 book. The book is ponderous and difficult to read, but the story it tells still dominates popular culture.

But when I looked up the etymology of the word, I found out it has nothing to do with Dracula, and everything to do with a guy named Draco.

Draco was a 7th century B.C. Athenian legislator who was charged with turning the oral laws and blood feuds that ruled Greek justice, into a unified written code.

In many ways, we have Draco to thank for some of our most cherished principles of liberty. Oral laws were arbitrarily administered in favor of wealthy landowners. Now a unified code was administered to all. He created the right of appeal. And he developed the concept of differentiating between intentional murder (death penalty) and involuntary homicide (exile).

What the Athenians didn't bargain for was the harshness of his penalties. Stealing a cabbage was a capital crime. Under the Draconian Constitution, a debtor of lower class than his creditor was forced into slavery. Yet, a debtor whose station was higher than his creditor went unpunished.

Plutarch wrote: "Drako himself, when asked why he had fixed the punishment of death for most offences, answered that he considered these lesser crimes to deserve it, and he had no greater punishment for more important ones."

But what of the word derived from Draco's name?

The definition of draconian reads: adjective (of laws or their application) excessively harsh and severe. Synonyms include: extreme, drastic, stringent, cruel, oppressive, ruthless, relentless, punitive, authoritarian, despotic, tyrannical, and repressive.

Halloween is the time of year when we let our nightmares loose.

Yes, draconian is a very good word for this time of year, indeed.