Friday 14 October 2016

lingo

Hellenologophobia is a fun word we learned that signifies fear of (and it’s pretty easy to deconstruct in hindsight) Greek terminology—by extension, anything unfamiliar, inscrutable or complex, adverse to jargon. Relatedly, there’s the not so easily prised apart sesquipedalophobia (literally Latin for a “foot and a half long”) and the monstrous and intimidating hippopotomonstrosesquipedaliophobia, both meaning fear of long words, the above length referring to poetic metre.