In which I coin a word
I'm great at starting things and never finishing them. This comes in handy when you need to quit cigarettes — not so much when you try to keep a journal or blog. The Internet is littered with my abandoned blogs.
One thing I do every day, though, is to waste time looking up answers to questions that occur to me, or are asked of me by my friends. Thank God for the Internet and Wikipedia — I used to spend hours in the library trying to find answers that can be answered in seconds now. (With time to spare for double-checking.) So... why not share the wealth with you, so I can pretend I'm doing something worthwhile?
I spent Thanksgiving with my girlfriend at her parents' house on Long Island, and some family friends were driving out from the city, a trip which was apparently causing them much tsouris.
"What's the word for 'fear of the suburbs'?" asked my girlfriend's father.
Now, not only do I hate not knowing the answer to something, but I have a particular love for -phobia words. When I was a kid, I discovered the Time/Life book The Mind — with its creepy pictures by Hieronymous Bosch, Louis Wain and William Kurelek — and was so alternately fascinated and scared that I dreamed of becoming a psychologist. I would look up phobia words in every book I could find, keeping a list written out on notebook paper, similar to the one I'd kept earlier for names of animal groups.
Though I imagine that there's quite a demand for it, especially among us New Yorkers, a quick search of the Internet seems to show no word for a fear of the suburbs, except for the obvious and distasteful Latin/Greek mash-up suburbaphobia. So I consulted an Ancient Greek dictionary at the bookstore and found that the word proast(e)ion (ou to) — pardon the (possibly incorrect) transliteration — means "suburb" or "environs." Therefore, I suggest a fear of the suburbs should be called proastiophobia. (I looked my coinage up, and I don't see it anywhere on the Internet.)
I'm a tremendous dork. (A dork that may some day end up with a citation in the Oxford English Dictionary!)
One thing I do every day, though, is to waste time looking up answers to questions that occur to me, or are asked of me by my friends. Thank God for the Internet and Wikipedia — I used to spend hours in the library trying to find answers that can be answered in seconds now. (With time to spare for double-checking.) So... why not share the wealth with you, so I can pretend I'm doing something worthwhile?
I spent Thanksgiving with my girlfriend at her parents' house on Long Island, and some family friends were driving out from the city, a trip which was apparently causing them much tsouris.
"What's the word for 'fear of the suburbs'?" asked my girlfriend's father.
Now, not only do I hate not knowing the answer to something, but I have a particular love for -phobia words. When I was a kid, I discovered the Time/Life book The Mind — with its creepy pictures by Hieronymous Bosch, Louis Wain and William Kurelek — and was so alternately fascinated and scared that I dreamed of becoming a psychologist. I would look up phobia words in every book I could find, keeping a list written out on notebook paper, similar to the one I'd kept earlier for names of animal groups.
Though I imagine that there's quite a demand for it, especially among us New Yorkers, a quick search of the Internet seems to show no word for a fear of the suburbs, except for the obvious and distasteful Latin/Greek mash-up suburbaphobia. So I consulted an Ancient Greek dictionary at the bookstore and found that the word proast(e)ion (ou to) — pardon the (possibly incorrect) transliteration — means "suburb" or "environs." Therefore, I suggest a fear of the suburbs should be called proastiophobia. (I looked my coinage up, and I don't see it anywhere on the Internet.)
I'm a tremendous dork. (A dork that may some day end up with a citation in the Oxford English Dictionary!)
Labels: Ancient Greek, phobias, psychology, words
posted by Jeff S. at 1:34 PM
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