Happy Friday the 13th! I’ve always been a contrary sort, and have liked the number 13 just out of principle. Really, I thought by year 2009, archaic superstitions would have largely phased out by now. That 85% of buildings tall enough to have elevators don’t have a 13th floor? Why not?
The term for this mass paranoia about Friday the 13th is “paraskevidekatriaphobia.” This is a long and difficult way of saying that one is a credulous moron, but maybe there are legitimate reasons for such a fear. Maybe something particularly terrible happened on a Friday the 13th, and for some reason the one salient detail that triggers a PTSD-type flashback happens to be the calendar date. At its worst, it’s annoying when someone has to reschedule an event or go out of their way to avoid a room that has arbitrarily been assigned the number 13, because of this primitive sort of fear. Even worse than that is when terrible people act on superstitions and general assholery, to inflict cruelty upon black cats around Halloween, say.
Here is a very long list of words to describe the irrational monsters lurking in peoples’ minds. I am guilty of some of these phobias: I take the stairs vs. riding the elevator whenever possible, and I really hate walking over open grates. (They never seem very sturdy, and I know that if anyone is klutzy enough to somehow fall into a sewer while walking, it’s me). But some of these phobias are, forgive my insensitivity, absolutely RIDICULOUS. Take “anthophobia,” which is a fear of flowers. Who’s scared of flowers, of all things? Does it matter what shape or color, or are all of them terror-inducing? “Ideophobia,” fear of ideas: I suspect a few of my classmates in college were probably ideophobes. I feel sorry for the aulophobics; how is a person mortally afraid of flutes going to deal with life?
I suspect that like this and most episodes of Maury Povich these days, quite a few of these phobia words are fictional. At least I hope so. Is there a term for “fear of people who have phobias?” “Fear for humanity?”
Post a Comment