phobia

My wife discovered a neighborhood cat living in our tool shed. She tried to chase it out, but thought she had failed. Now she keeps checking the shed to make sure he isn't trapped in there.

She tells me she's paranoid about killing something inadvertently.

Ever the pedant, I said, "I think you mean phobic, not paranoid -- unless you're afraid the cat is out to get you..."

But once I'd brought "phobia" into it, I wanted to know exactly which phobia she was claiming to have. I can't find "fear of killing" on Wikipedia's phobia list. The closest they have is

• Necrophobia -- fear of death, the dead.

But I know that Wikipedia's list is incomplete, because they don't even have the next-closest phobia to the one I'm looking for: Thanatophobia - fear of being killed.

They do have an interesting list.

For instance,

• Agoraphobia -- fear of a place or event where escape is impossible or when help is unavailiable.

How did a term that clearly should mean fear of the market turn into something so different? We Agoraphiles need this word! Fear of the market is obviously prevalent and should be identified as what it is.

There is another term that many of us ought to find useful in our discussions with the less liberty minded:

• Hoplophobia -- fear of firearms (guns).

I came to college a lot more sympathetic to feminism than I was when I left. Part of that change was the result of encountering too many feminists who seemed to have

• Androphobia -- fear of males.
• Erotophobia -- fear of sexual love or sexual questions.
• Gymnophobia -- fear of nudity.

(Some of my favorite feminists had the same complaint. They started calling themselves "do-me feminists" or "pro-sex feminists" to distinguish themselves from the phobias of what seemed to be the academic feminist mainstream.)

Here's one the detractors of individualism are regularly accusing us of:

• Sociophobia -- fear/dislike of society or people in general (see also "sociopath").

That's not true of the philosophy or the method, though it's certainly true of some individual individualists ... individually. I might fairly be accused of sociophobia, mainly because I find that so many people have conversational bathophobia:

• Bathophobia -- fear of depth.

Where's the opposite malady? We need a name for fear of shallowness.


This one I just like for the irony of it:

• Hippopotomonstrosesquipedaliaphobia - fear of long words (go figure)

This one I don't experience at the beginning of the 21st century nearly as much as I did at the end of the 20th:

• Technophobia -- fear of technology (see also Luddite).

Here's one of my least-favorite words:

• Homophobia -- dislike of homosexuality or of becoming homosexual. (This word has become a common political term, and many people interpret it as a slur.)

Interpreted as a slur? No, that word was invented as a slur. When I first heard it, I assumed it was the clinical term for what an older generation called "homosexual dread" -- the fear of turning out to be gay. But no, it was a deliberate slur term that conflated fear of with opposition to.

That conflation is not without precedent, of course. It's just a more specific version of how this word gets used:

• Xenophobia -- fear of strangers, foreigners, or aliens.

Everyone knows that Doctor Octopus and the Green Goblin suffer from

• Arachnophobia -- fear of arachnids, usually specific to spiders.

But thanks to this list, I now know that The Penguin, The Riddler, and The Joker suffer

• Chiroptophobia -- fear of bats.

And of course, we have the monstrous FDR to thank for

• Phobophobia -- the fear of fear itself.