Perhaps it’s etymologically appropriate that one of the first movies produced by National Lampoon, Animal House involved a lot of drinking.

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I can’t be completely sure but it may have been about the time of that movie Animal House in 1978 that I first became aware of the word lampoon.

Perhaps I’d heard of the magazine National Lampoon before that, it started in 1970 and my impression was that while Mad Magazine was junior high humor, National Lampoon was university humor.

Of course the word lampoon had been around for centuries before I noticed it or the magazine adopted the name.

The Oxford English Dictionary dates lampoon to 1645 and defines it as “a virulent or scurrilous satire upon an individual.”

All etymologies point to French as the source of lampoon but an equivalent word there seems to have blinked out of existence before lexicographers could nail it to the dictionnaire.

But most English dictionaries have a theory about that French word.

They say lampoon could possibly have been from a French word meaning “let us drink” which seems to have evolved from the same source as our word lap as a cat does when lapping up a saucer of milk.

So it seems that this word lampoon had evolved into some kind of a tavern cry which found its way into various drinking songs. In turn the drinking songs sometimes made fun of the politicians of the day and so the word lampoon moved from meaning “let us drink” to referring to the cutting humor of the drinking songs.