It started with a wikipedia entry of the day on a Yakuza film Branded to Kill. The digression was made to fetishism and so to a list of paraphilias and other deviations from the norm.
By the time I reached Troilism, my first thought was the same as Steve here below:
From Steve:
I have a disagreement with a friend over the origin of the word troilism. She claims it is straightforward, from the French trois “three”, while I understood that it had its roots in the Shakespeare play Troilus and Cressida, when Ulysses makes Troilus watch his lover Cressida cavorting with Diomedes. I would be very grateful if you could resolve this for us.
The OED says “perhaps from French trois “three”. If they were more certain, they would have omitted the perhaps. However, the first known incidence of the word in writing occurs in Dorland’s Medical Dictionary of 1941. This indicates that troilism was (if it isn’t still) a medical/psychological term. We tend to think that a source of medical term etymologies, especially medical terms having to do with sexual practices, might be more reliable as far as this word’s origins go, and The Dictionary of Sexology claims, with no equivocation, that the term derives from trois. The editors of that work may be privy to primary sources that the OED editors haven’t seen, or they may simply not have considered that Troilus and Cressida might be the source of the term. We tend to believe that the term was formed from trois with influence from ménage à trois, which is recorded at least 50 years earlier than troilism..
This information is from the ‘Take our Word for it’ website, last updated 11/15/06 after 11 years on the web.
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