Fear of Shellfish

Which reasons people actually avoid shellfish

An article published on 28 September 2021 on shellfish phobias reports that most causes of ostraconophobia fall into four categories:

• the risk of food poisoning
• religious dietary restrictions
• allergies
• texture or taste

That list dismantles the word as it goes. Avoiding shellfish because it can poison somebody is a reasonable precaution. Avoiding it because a religion forbids it is obedience. Avoiding it because of an allergy is medicine. Only the last category, an aversion to the texture or the taste, describes anything like a response to the object itself, and even that is a dislike rather than a fear.

The 2008 encyclopedia of phobias adds nothing to help. It records that fear of shellfish is known as ostraconophobia and sends the reader to its own entries for fish and for shellfish.

How a game documented the fear

The word has a fuller life in a historical role-playing game, where Ostraconophobia is a hidden achievement introduced in an expansion. Its description is a single sentence: the player was nipped to death by crayfish.

The instructions for earning it are precise. The achievement becomes available during a particular quest, after speaking to the cellarer in a monastery kitchen, which produces an optional objective to find a book on the first shelf to the left of the library entrance, titled to describe the crayfish as the poor man's salmon. Reading it fully sets the objective to catch crayfish. From there the player continues catching them until one kills them.

The mechanics are documented as carefully as any clinical protocol. A crayfish pinch does 8 points of damage, and the animals do not always pinch on the first attempt, so the player is advised to drop them and pick them up repeatedly. Since 8 damage is not much, the guidance suggests lowering health first by jumping from a height, while warning that the death must come from the pinch itself and not from bleeding. Two character perks that regenerate up to 50 and 75 health make the attempt harder, so a potion that removes them is recommended.

It is a joke with a great deal of care in it, and the care is what makes it interesting. Somebody had to decide how much damage a crayfish does.

How the word was translated

The achievement's localised names show two strategies. Most languages transliterate the Greek compound directly, so the word appears in French, German, Italian, Polish, Portuguese, Spanish, Turkish and Russian in recognisably the same form.

Two do something else. The Czech and Ukrainian versions replace the medical-sounding coinage with a local idiom about crayfish, which is a translator deciding that the joke matters more than the terminology. That is a reasonable judgement about a word whose only substantial use is a joke.

The compound itself is straightforward: the Greek ostrakon, meaning shell or shellfish, and phobos, fear. Literally, the fear of shellfish.