Monday, August 1, 2011

PHOBIAS

Here is a great list of phobias from Wikipedia:

 Non-psychological conditions

  • Aquaphobia – fear of water
  • Photophobia – hypersensitivity to light causing aversion to light
  • Phonophobia – hypersensitivity to sound causing aversion to sounds.
  • Osmophobia – hypersensitivity to smells causing aversion to odors.

 Biology, chemistry

Biologists use a number of -phobia/-phobic terms to describe predispositions by plants and animals against certain conditions. For antonyms, see here.

 Prejudices and discrimination

The suffix -phobia is used to coin terms that denote a particular anti-ethnic or anti-demographic sentiment, such as Americanophobia, Europhobia, Francophobia, Hispanophobia, and Indophobia. Often a synonym with the prefix "anti-" already exists (e.g., Polonophobia vs. anti-Polonism). Anti-religious sentiments are expressed in terms such as Christianophobia and Islamophobia. Sometimes the terms themselves could even be considered racist, such as with "Negrophobia."
Other prejudices include:

 Jocular and fictional phobias

news|url=http://sports.uniontrib.com/uniontrib/20060610/news_1mi10jenkins.html%7Ctitle=I hate to burst Poway Unified's balloon|date=2006-06-10|work=The San Diego Union-Tribune}}</ref>
  • Anatidaephobia - the fictional fear that somewhere, somehow, a duck is watching you. From Gary Larson's The Far Side.
  • Anoraknophobia – a portmanteau of "anorak" and "arachnophobia". Used in the Wallace and Gromit comic book Anoraknophobia. Also the title of an album by Marillion.
  • Arachibutyrophobia – fear of peanut butter sticking to the roof of the mouth. The word is used by Charles M. Schulz in a 1982 installment of his "Peanuts" comic strip[5] and by Peter O'Donnell in his 1985 Modesty Blaise adventure novel Dead Man's Handle.[6]
  • Hippopotomonstrosesquipedaliophobia – fear of long words.[7] Hippopoto- "big" due to its allusion to the Greek-derived word hippopotamus (though this is derived as hippo- "horse" compounded with potam-os "river", so originally meaning "river horse"; according to the Oxford English, "hippopotamine" has been construed as large since 1847, so this coinage is reasonable); -monstr- is from Latin words meaning "monstrous", -o- is a noun-compounding vowel; -sesquipedali- comes from "sesquipedalian" meaning a long word (literally "a foot and a half long" in Latin), -o- is a noun-compounding vowel, and -phobia means "fear". Note: This was mentioned on the first episode of Brainiac Series Five as one of Tickle's Teasers.
  • Keanuphobia - fear of Keanu Reeves, portrayed in the Dean Koontz book, False Memory, where a woman has an irrational fear of Keanu Reeves and has to see her psychiatrist, Mark Ahriman, each week. He calls her the "Keanuphobe" in his head. She eventually ends up killing her psychiatrist because she believes that he is one of the Machine agents trying to control her.
  • Luposlipaphobia - fear of being pursued by timber wolves around a kitchen table while wearing socks on a newly waxed floor, also from Gary Larson's The Far Side.
  • Nihilophobia - fear of nothingness (comes from the combination of the Latin word nihil which means nothing, none, and the suffix -phobia), as described by the Doctor in the Star Trek: Voyager episode Night. Voyager's morale officer and chef Neelix suffers from this condition, having panic attacks while the ship was traversing a dark expanse of space known as the Void. It is also the title of a 2008 album by Neuronium. Also, the animated version of George of the Jungle (2007 TV series) is seen suffering in one episode of the cartoon, where they are telling scary stories.
  • Venustraphobia – fear of beautiful women, according to a 1998 humorous article published by BBC News.[1] The word is a portmanteau of "Venus trap" and "phobia". Venustraphobia is the title of a 2006 album by Casbah Club.
  • Monkeyphobia - fear of monkeys, as named by Lord Monkey Fist in the animated series Kim Possible. Due to spending a summer in a cabin with a crazy chimp mascot, Ron Stoppable has a fear of monkeys, which he gets over several times, usually during battles with Monkey Fist, who is essentially Ron's arch-nemesis.

 Miscellaneous

http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Porphyrophobia

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