Tuesday, 29 August 2017

Hippopotomonstrosesquippedaliophobia

Prize of the day goes to readers who can identify this phobia without resorting to a search engine.

Hippo - Horse (Greek)
Potamos - River (Greek)
Monstro - Monstrous being, or something huge and terrifying (Latin)
Sesquippedalio - Adaptation from Latin meaning 'over a foot and a half high'.

I bet you got phobia, well done! (If not, it means morbid fear)

So what is Hippopotomonstrosesquippedaliophobia when it's at home?  Fear of a hippopotamus perhaps?  You'd be right to respect them, their reputation as Africa's most dangerous large land animal is well deserved.  Cuddly and pink, in this case, does not mean, well, cuddly and friendly.  At all.

Nah, our word inventors have gone way out there on this one.  Which Mensa candidate designated a phobia about long words with a name 38 letters long?

Hippopotomonstrosesquippedaliophobia is a very real phobia, leaving suffers to sweat and tremble in a full blown anxiety attack when confronting a very long word.  

How to pronounce it:
Hippo
Poto
Monstro
Sesqui
Pedalio
Phobia

If in doubt, resort to Mary Poppins and sing it out - 
Supercalifragilisticexpialidocious was a popular song from the musical Mary Poppins and we've all bellowed it out at some time or the other. Um-dittle-ittl-um-dittle-i. Songwriters Richard and Robert Sherman clearly didn't suffer from Hippopotomonstrosesquippedaliophobia and it's a good thing neither Dick van Dyck nor Julie Andrews did, as the 4 Oscars swept up by the film enhanced their movie careers no end.

It's downright cruel to give sufferers of this phobia such a mouthful to read and pronounce.  I wonder if they can even bear to take the prescription from the Doctor, let alone hand it over to a Pharmacist and answer his friendly enquiry about how the Hippopotomonstrosesquippedaliophobia is today?

To tie your tongue in monstrous knots, listen to the 
Hippopotomonstrosesquippedaliophobia song on the link below.  It's really chipper and annoyingly, you'll be leaping from humming this to Supercalifragilisticexpialidocious for the next 24 hours.  Sorry!



Image result for hippopotomonstrosesquippedaliophobia


https://youtu.be/C-V6FHWYtcg











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