Casual Observer

Fear of Just About Everything

By Mark Levy 

I don’t always look up interesting topics on the Internet. Honest! Sometimes a web site finds me. For example, the other day I was minding my own business when a web site called phobialist.com came to my attention. To be truthful, I may have provoked the event by googling “fear of running out of topics for Ragazine.” In any event, I now have a list of about 600 phobias in alphabetical order. I’d like to share some of the more obscure phobias with you and leave the mundane ones for another day. No need to talk about fear of floods, fear of wet dreams, or fear of vomiting on an airplane right now.

Did you know some people have a fear of frogs? That’s called betrachophobia. You can have a fear of being tickled by a feather, in which case you’re pteronophobic. I suppose you might have a fear of being tickled by a frog, in which case you’d have betracho-pteronophobia, which is easy for me to say when I’m not being tickled.

Looks like many people have fears of other people. For example, you might have a fear of young girls parthenophobia), a fear of teenagers (ephebilphobia), or a fear of old people (gerontophobia). So you can move easily from one fear to another as your relatives outgrow your fear of them.

For every occupation, there seems to be a fearful word. If you don’t like your dentist, you may have dentophobia. See how easy this can be? And if you must walk to your doctor’s office across a side of town that beggars and hobos inhabit, I hope you haven’t developed hobophobia. I once had a dentist with breath bad enough to be a hobo’s breath, but lucky for me, I didn’t have hobodentophobia.

Scared of foreigners? In general, that’s xenophobia, although there are separate words for fear of the French, the English, the Chinese, the Greeks and, of course, the Germans. You might know these words if you attended more parties. That wouldn’t be easy if you’re an enochlophobe, fearing crowds or mobs.

There’s always a silver lining: If you avoid crowds, you won’t be visiting the circus, so your coulrophobia, fear of clowns, won’t act up.

I think a number of people fear childbirth, but I wasn’t aware there are actually four words to identify that phobia: maleusiophobia, tocophobia, parturiphobia, and lockiophobia. Those are run-of-the-mill childbirth phobias. But if you’re unusually concerned about delivering a deformed baby, you’ve graduated to teratophobia.

One of my favorites is the word that means an irrational fear of chopsticks. It’s consecotaleophobia, which seems harder to say than to use the darn things, but then again, I’m no psychiatrist.

If you suffer from enissophobia, you may decide not to be an essayist for Weekend Radio, because enissophobia is the fear of criticism —— not that Robert Conrad would ever criticize anyone.

Here’s another cutie: the fear of everything. It’s known as panophobia, which is not exactly what I’ve been developing myself —— a fear of phobias. Oh wait. There’s a name for that, too. It’s phobophobia.

You can find all these and more online, if you don’t have cyberphobia, a fear of computers, that is. The web site, again, is phobialist.com.

New Orleans

New Orleans, Woven Photo, Copyright 2010, Valerie Brown