I'm a nomophobe, how about you?

This Saturday, friends of words, we're talking about phobias, but don't be... scared, it's going to be fine. It was Karen who gave me the idea for this topic. I had just posted on LinkedIn the announcement of an online dictation that I am organizing next week on the website of the newspaper Le Monde, and she replied: "What do you call someone who is afraid of dictations? ? Because it's… my middle name! »

Lots of people have a panic fear of dictation, it's true! However, I searched everywhere, and I did not find the name of this fear. But while browsing, I found others, all formed with the suffix phobia, of course. Phobia, on its own, is "fear", which comes from the Greek phobos, designating "the desperate flight, the dread", according to Le Robert. But the word covers two meanings, in French: the "morbid fear, the anguish felt in front of certain objects, acts, situations", but also the meaning of aversion.

There are plenty of words that end in "phobia". Let's move quickly on what is aversion, they are not the most sympathetic: homophobia, xenophobia, etc. But the page that Wikipedia devotes to phobias is a veritable Prévert-style inventory of more or less disabling and more or less funny mental disorders, it must be admitted. We know the fear of spiders, arachnophobia, fear of confined spaces, claustrophobia, but there is also emetophobia (fear of vomiting), food neophobia (fear of tasting new foods), acrophobia (fear of heights), aquaphobia (fear of water). I am sure that Stéphane Carpentier does not suffer from glossophobia, from the ancient Greek glossa, language, it is the fear of speaking in public. But maybe he is afraid of the dark, in which case he would be achluophobe (trained on achluos, darkness).

A very modern and connected term

Or in the original phobia genre, I suggest myrmecophobia, the fear of ants, from the ancient Greek murmex, or trypophobia, the fear of holes. Personally, I must admit that, among other mental illnesses, I suffer from odontophobia, the fear of dental care, and also from this disorder which recently entered the Larousse: nomophobia.

The word comes from the English "no mobile", "without mobile phone", it is the fear of being separated from your smartphone. The main thing is all the same not to be affected by pantophobia, from the Greek pan, which means everything (which we find in panacea, which cures everything, pan-African, which concerns all of Africa, or pandemic , an epidemic that affects the whole world): in short, pantophobia is the fear of everything.

As for the fear of Karen's dictations, when a word does not exist, nothing prevents us from creating one: what do you think of orthography? So, dear orthographobes, against your disease, here is my prescription: a "Candy on the tongue" a day for 30 days. Renew as many times as necessary.