Do you suffer from the heartbreak of aibohphobia, the fear of palindromes?

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

The Merriam-Webster Dictionary defines aibohphobia as:

 

“Fear of palindromes (words, verses, sentences, or numbers that read the same backward or forward).”

 

It also is a palindrome, and it comes from taking the last five letters of phobia, reversing them to form a prefix, and adding phobia as the suffix. The word appears under Jocular and Fictional Phobias in the Wikipedia article List of Phobias. Wikipedia says this word is a piece of computer humor from the 1981 The Devil’s DP Dictionary. But OptimistMinds has an apparently serious article titled Fear of palindromes (a brief overview).

 

There is an article on palindromes by James A. Fussell in the Chicago Tribune on January 4, 2002 titled Sit on a potato pan, Otis: We are the palindrome generation. He says that, since the word palindrome isn’t a palindrome, it should be replaced by the word palinnilap – which is one. Another article by Jonathan Becher at Manage By Walking Around on March 20, 2022 is titled Fun with palindromes, without aibohphobia.

 

There even is a song titled Aibohphobia by Shakey Graves, whose lyrics are here. 

 

I previously have blogged about the heartbreaks of both robophobia and scriptophobia.