Phobia¶
Psychotherapy (Humanities), 1969
A powerful suffix which can instantly stigmatize anyone at all just by adding to any other word, making it sound like a legitimate medical condition only non-intellectual™ people wouldn’t know.
Original a psychiatric term denoting a panic-inducing morbid terror and avoidance of something (e.g. spiders, snakes, rabies/water), the usage of “phobia” to denote irrational dislike was introduced as a “descriptor for the intolerant” by psychotherapist George Weinberg’s guesswork in a pornographic magazine. Phobos (Greek) originally meant “flight” in the sense of “swiftly running” (from the Proto-Indo-European root meaning “to run”), the meaning that Homer intended when the word appeared in The Iliad and The Odyssey. Only thereafter did it become the common word for “fear” due to its association with “fleeing” in a panic or a fright, before it was added to social descriptors at the start of the 18th century.