Phil Cousineau’s
Wordcatcher is a logophile’s
dream. 250 words, each with a
delightful back story to keep you entangled in etymologies, what’s not to
love? And, who knows, perhaps this
treasure chest of remarkable words will encourage you to start your own
wordcatching journey.
Take a look:
Arachibutyrophobia
The fear of peanut butter
sticking to the roof of your mouth. Curious,
right? Every time I read or hear the word I think of spiders, from the
Greek arachne. But it’s really a very long and potent word for a
very peculiar phobia, stemming from the Greek arachi, a glutinous
oil present in peanut butter; butryo, to stick or adhere; and phobia,
fear. As someone who has been afflicted with esophageal and swallowing
problems all his life, I can swear to what appears to be a universal fear
of getting something stuck in the throat. So it’s not difficult to
imagine someone, especially with a peanut allergy, being terrified of
its buttery version clogging up her mouth. The problem is mythic, a
larger-than-life fear, or phobia—a word that can be traced back
to Phobos, son of Ares, god of terror, but the symptoms are real,
persistent, an unrealistic fear that seizes the whole person, resulting
in symptoms of nausea, dizziness, and shame. That said, there is
no shortage of curious phobias, such as: erythrophobia, the fear
of blushing; ablutophobia, fear of washing or cleaning; euphobia,
fear of good news; chromophobia, fear of color; gnomophobia, fear
of gnomes; catoptrophia, fear of mirrors; Venustraphobia,
the fear of beautiful and alluring women; kakorrhapphiophobia is the
fear of failure and hippomonstrosesquipedaliophobia, fear of long
words, and perhaps longer definitions. Speaking of frightful words, a
curious fear I’ve suffered from on occasion, especially on long airplane
flights, is abibliophobia, the fear of not having enough to read.
To be fair, let’s conclude with an antidote of a word, counterphobia,
which refers to “the desire or seeking out of experiences that are
consciously or unconsciously feared.” It’s not unlike the advice your
mom gave you after your first bad fall from a bicycle—climb back on.
Argonaut
A bold and daring
sailor. A smooth-sailing word that combines
the ancient Greek argos, swift; the beauty of a fine ship, naus;
and the sailor courage of a nautes. They merge in Argo, the
galley on which the Argonauts set sail, which in turn was named after Argus,
its ingenious builder. Webster’s succinctly defines an Argonaut as “any of
a band of heroes who sailed with Jason in quest of the Golden Fleece.” I
vividly recall my father’s Heritage Club edition of the book by Apollonius of
Rhodes, Argonautica, which we read aloud as a family over one long
Michigan winter. The legend recounts how Jason persuaded forty-nine sailors to
accompany him on a perilous mission from Iolcos to remote Colchis, in what is
now Georgia, at the far end of the Black Sea. Their mythic task was to capture the
golden fleece, which hung on a sacred oak guarded by a fire-snorting dragon.
Curiously, in 1849, many of those who left home and hearth for the California
gold mines were called “Argonauts,” in honor of Jason’s adventure, as well
as “’49ers,” an uncanny echo of the forty-nine sailors who traveled with him in
search of the resplendent wool. The Argonauts adventure lives on in Argos,
a constellation in the northern sky; Captain Nemo’s ship, the Nautilus,
in Twenty Thousand Leagues Under the Sea; the spiral-shelled nautilus,
which the ancients believed sailed underwater; and nausea, seasickness,
from naus, ship. Another haunting echo of the word is found in one of
the most touching scenes in all of literature, from the final book of the Odyssey,
when the hero returns home to Ithaka after
his twenty-year long adventure and is recognized by his faithful dog Argos— who wags his tail,
then dies quietly.
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