Friday, September 14, 2012

Luposlipaphobia is as useful a word as glossophobia












What is it? Luposlipaphobia was defined by Gary Larson as:

“The fear of being pursued by timber wolves around a kitchen table while wearing socks on a newly waxed floor.”

That definition was the caption for one of his The Far Side cartoons. You can find it here or here. In Wikipedia luposlipaphobia shows up on their List of Phobias under the heading of jocular and fictional phobias.  

Glossophobia is a pseudo-technical term for public speaking anxiety. It might as well refer to the fear of lip gloss or waxing your car. Nevertheless it keeps showing up in the titles of blog posts like this one. Sometimes it’s even misspelled as glossaphobia. Just like the word atelophobia, using it as a search term will send you down blind alleys. 


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