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The cosmic joke was on me: the question turns out to be one that people keep asking and asking. Still, none of the various coinages has caught on. Even now I get mail asking for a word to be coined to meet this need. ” —Michael J. ). For instance, fauxincidence, coincivince, coincidon’t, duperstition, and wishful linking. But in this case an especially large number of people are convinced that the word sought already exists. Clement J. ” The Skeptic’s Dictionary, by Robert Todd Carroll, bears Colucci out (“Apophenia is the spontaneous perception of connections and meaningfulness of unrelated phenomena”).

Offered up a nice variation on the theme: phthrobia. ” He went on to explain: “That current editions of the standard reference works appear to have passed it over is unfortunate, as it brings with it an interesting history. Although folk etymology embraces an obvious derivation, it is of course to the classical Greek, and especially that of Homer, that we should turn for a full understanding. While Liddell & Scott’s Greek-English Lexicon offers us the Attic, it is clearly to the Homeric that we should turn (A Lexicon of the Homeric Dialect, Cunliffe R.

It was coined by John Ficarra in the March 1981 issue of Mad magazine. Orthopolitiphobia is a fear of political correctness. According to private correspondence from the professional wordsmith Charles Harrington Elster, this is a coinage of his. Psychophobia is either a fear of being attacked in the shower or fear of the mind, according to There’s a Word for It. ” lmlmllmlmllml 44 lmlmllmlmllml Seen-o-phobia is the compulsion to close the door when using the bathroom, even when no one else is home.