Monday, May 23, 2005

You've probably seen the phobia list. A list of all the available scientific names in alphabetical order. Here's a different ordering. A list of all charted fears called the fear list. So now you can look for your fear and find out the scientific name.

Some funny stuff too.
Excerpt :
"Fear of the Pope is Papaphobia. The fear of puppets is Pupaphobia. And the fear of being tickled with feathers is Pteronophobia. So, by extrapolating between these three names, I imagine that Papapupapteronophobia might suffice in naming the heretofore unnamed fear of being tickled by an insane Pope puppet armed with feathers. (Yes, I know that nothing in my newly-coined word states a quality of madness, per se. But still, I imagine this particular holy terror of a tickle-monster puppet would, indeed, be quite insane. It's not Catholic-bashing, or anything like that. It's just a gut-feeling I have. If you wanna prove me wrong, go ahead. But your research model and methodologies should be scientifically sound and your resultant data should stand the test of independent replication. So there. And you'd best beware if you suffer from, say, Hellenologophobia — the fear of complex scientific terminology.)

Hippopotomonstrosesquippedaliophobia is, I think, the product of someone's very twisted and sadistic sense of humor. This gratuitously over-long word has been coined to define the "Fear of long words." Can you imagine the torturous effect on the poor phobe who is given this clinical diagnosis of his or her very real disorder? ("What's that, Dr. Stein? I'm... I'm hippopotomonstrosesquippedaliophobic!? ACK!!!") Fer chrissake, that's just downright mean-spirited and cruel."

No comments:

Post a Comment