Mazomanie

Ann Althouse ends a post on Wisconsin cuisine with a linguistic comment:

. . . isn’t it cool that there’s a town called “Mazomanie.” It sounds sounds like a form of insanity. A cute and amazing mania.

It does indeed sound like a form of mania. Though unattested in dictionaries, ‘mazomanie’ certainly looks like a properly-formed ancient Greek word. Maníe (three syllables) is the Ionic form of manía, “madness”, and mazós is the Epic/Ionic form of mastós, as in ‘mastectomy’ and ‘mastodon’, so ‘mazomanie’ would be a word Herodotus might have used to describe’a mania for female breasts. It is one of the commoner manias today, particularly among adolescent males, but not many women would describe it as “cute and amazing”. Returning to Althouse’s culinary theme, I wonder if there’s a Hooter’s in Mazomanie, Wisconsin.

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