Collection · 14 entries
Words That Are Not Phobias
A word ending in -phobia is not thereby the name of a fear, and every phobia list on the internet carries terms that prove it without saying so. There are three separate failures here and the set is ordered by them. The first is scientific usage: in chemistry and medicine a phobic thing repels or is repelled, which is why photophobia names sensitivity to light and thermophobia names a property of a foam and a bacterium. Nobody in those fields means afraid.
The second failure is prejudice. Lookism is illegal discrimination in one Australian state, ageism is a documented pattern of hostility, and calling either an anxiety disorder is a category error that flatters the prejudice, moving it from the person holding it to a condition they suffer from. The third is political usage, where the word is an accusation aimed at an opponent and the fear is entirely notional. Each entry documents where the word came from, who uses it and in what sense, and says plainly when no diagnostic manual carries it and no clinical literature studies it as a fear. The set opens with two genuine fears, kept as boundary cases, so the contrast with everything after them is legible.
Hand-set, never alphabetical
The set, in order
14 entries
- Fear of ClownsIncluded as the boundary case: a real fear with real research, which makes the contrast legible
- Fear of Public SpeakingRecognised, but as social anxiety disorder rather than as a specific phobia
- Fear of LightPhotophobia is sensitivity to light, a symptom with a mechanism, and the suffix means nothing here
- Fear of HeatThermophobia names a foam, a bacterium and a direction of particle motion, and a fear in none of them
- Fear of OdoursOsmophobia is hypersensitivity, consistent in migraine histories, and in some patients the trigger
- ArithmomaniaThe suffix here is mania rather than phobia, correctly: the counting is the response, not the threat
- CounterphobiaThe exact inverse of a phobia, kept in the catalogue to mark where the word stops applying
- Fear of UglinessCacophobia names a prejudice that one Australian state has made illegal, which no fear has managed
- Fear of Old PeopleGerontophobia is ageism, and the sources say so, which puts the hostility in the person holding it
- Fear of ChemicalsDescribed in its own literature as a non-clinical aversion, addressed by education rather than by clinicians
- Fear of Home SurroundingsWanderlust in 1808, hatred of housework in the 1950s, a political accusation since 1993, a diagnosis never
- Fear of TyrantsA political attitude that two legal scholars argue has obstructed reform, which is not what a phobia does
- Fear of the PenisMostly a term of argument about masculinity, with the literal fear documented barely at all
- Fear of the Number 13A superstition rather than a prejudice, and the same lesson about what the suffix does not prove
Keep going
The other collections
- Medical and Dental FearsThe fears whose avoidance is itself the danger. Needles, dentists, doctors, hospitals and scans, and what avoiding each one costs the person avoiding it.
- Most Common PhobiasSpiders, heights, flying, the dentist, public speaking: the phobias most often called common, each with the prevalence figure the claim rests on.
- One Word, Two Different FearsAerophobia, phonophobia, basophobia: terms carrying two unrelated senses, with the collision traced and the usable meaning named.
- Phobias in the DSM-5Animal, natural environment, blood-injection-injury, situational and other: one entry per DSM-5 type, plus the fears the manual filed somewhere else.