Fear of Beards

That is a dated attestation with a source and a context, which is rarer in this catalogue than it should be, and it establishes the term's character immediately. The beard in that sentence is not frightening because of hair. It is frightening because of what it signals politically, and the word was coined about a reaction to a signal.

What the beard is taken to mean

Christopher Oldstone-Moore, who lectures in history at Wright State University and wrote The Beard Movement in Victorian Britain, gave the current version in 2013. For a hundred years a beard has read as a mark of individuality and defiance, and the suspicion attaching to it is real enough that men in politics, in public service, in business and, he adds, in journalism put their standing at risk by putting the razor down.

That is the same mechanism as the Jesuits and the democratic chin, a century and a half later. What is being read is not the beard but the decision to have one.

Beardism is the term offered for discrimination on the basis of facial hair, and the material notes the factors that vary the reading:

• cultural difference
• associations with poor hygiene, including among homeless men
• women's fashion preferences
• religious practice, since Judaism and Islam treat beards with particular reverence and some groups require them and forbid shaving

Why Paxman accused the BBC of pogonophobia

In August 2013 Jeremy Paxman accused his employers of pogonophobia after newspapers and social media criticised him for presenting Newsnight with a beard. His formulation compared the corporation to the late Albanian dictator Enver Hoxha, and named the few figures he considered exempt.

He then undermined his own campaign with an admission worth preserving: "The thing is, I don't normally like beards." Having become, in his own description, a poster boy for the Beard Liberation Front, he described it as quite a heavy burden.

Robin Lustig, a former BBC Radio 4 and World Service broadcaster and a previous winner of Beard of the Year, agreed the corporation was pogonophobic. Danny Baker of BBC Radio 5 Live took the other side, saying he did not think Paxman should be granted a beard, calling it corrupt, and adding that Disney had it right.

Baker's reference is exact. Disney banned employees from wearing beards for nearly sixty years, and lifted the ban in 2012.

What Watson did to a small boy

In the 1920s the psychologist John B. Watson produced this fear in a small boy, deliberately, using ordinary conditioning.

That is the whole of the experimental record for pogonophobia, and it is the same researcher and the same decade as the goldfish demonstration recorded under fear of fish. Watson produced fears as readily as he removed them, and a fear of beards is among the things he produced.

How the word is meant

The sources are blunt about the register. It is normally said as a joke.

This catalogue records it as an entry anyway, because a word used lightly for a reaction to a political and social signal, with a dated 1851 attestation and one conditioning experiment behind it, is a more interesting object than most of the terms that are used seriously.

The Greek is pogon, a beard, and phobos. The 2008 printed encyclopedia defines it as fear of beards or of men with beards, which adds the second reading the modern usage mostly assumes.