Venerable Verbiage II

To the eternal regret of my late mother, who greatly admired those ambitious souls she called "go-getters", I've never been a careerist, preferring to smell the roses rather than grow them. So stumbling upon the wacky world of medical transcription in the late 70s was a lucky break. It allowed me to make my own hours, dress the way I wanted, change jobs and geography whenever I got antsy, utilize my awesome spelling and editing talents, and nurture my hypochondriacal soul.

Medical transcriptionists in those days were, like me, square-pegged, often over-educated, under-achieving, socially challenged, authority-hating eccentric drifters with substance abuse issues who just wanted to make a few bucks to finance their free time. And I will say that medical transcription paid well because not a lot of people were willing to put up with sore butts and backs, damage their hearing and develop repetitive motion injuries from sitting in front of a typing device for hours on end trying to turn what some exhausted, bored doctor was spewing into a medical record that passed muster. The pay almost made up for the funky venues where the powers that be would stash us. During my transcription "career" I worked in a dark hallway with an emergency exit on one end, a dank basement, a trailer that ran hot or cold, the corner of a communal work space near the johns, and even an employee lounge among the coffee-slurping staff. Every once in a while I scored my own office, but that was rare. (For that I had to sleep with the boss. Just kidding.)

Starting with an IBM Selectric in the 70s and continuing into the 90s through the word processor/computer revolutions, I gradually wrecked my ears listening to the taped voices of countless egomaniacal MDs and typed many thousands of medical reports, in the process adding a multitude of multisyllabics to my vocabulary'"like my personal favorite, hysterosalpingo-oophorectomy. Working as a medical transcriptionist also permanently cured me of a common delusion that a doctor is omniscient, setting me firmly on the smoother path of taking care of my health largely without medical assistance.

Be that as it may, herewith is my second, no doubt eagerly awaited installment of Venerable Verbiage. Let's begin with The Morbids.

Phobias can be highly exotic. For example, I watched a reality show the other day in which the contestant had no phobias except for a morbid fear of snails (um, helicophobia? just guessing here), so this field is still pregnant with possibilities.

If instead of slimy snails, you can't handle teeny mites or tiny objects, you're an acarophobic. On the other end of the size spectrum, a fear of celestial space and stars is called astrophobia.

It's interesting to speculate that some insomniacs may, in fact, have a morbid fear of the fatigue that will make them sleep, or kopophobia.

On the other hand, if you're afraid to talk because you think you might stutter, you're a laliophobiac.

Did you know that the men who sign up for hair transplants are peladophobic (they dread baldness)?

A very common fear among children and even adults is scotophobia, being afraid of the dark. But not so common is sinistrophobia aka levophobia, a morbid fear of objects on the left side. If you happen to be a southpaw that would be very inconvenient.

Then there are those who must spend a lot of time wearing face masks because they're so afraid of air, drafts, invisible air-borne influences, and body odor.

Here's a perfectly rational-sounding fear, as far as I'm concerned: aichmophobia, the fear of sharp-pointed objects. If you happen to have a morbid fear of being scratched by those sharp objects or anything else, then you're an amychophobiac.

I can relate to this one: ergasiophobia, or a morbid aversion to work. Curiously, it can also mean an irrational fear of performing surgical operations, which is perfectly sane if you're not a surgeon. The guy who used a butter knife to operate on himself recently clearly doesn't suffer from that.

If you thought you had problems, there are people trying to get through life with a morbid fear of tastes (geumaphobia), lightning (keraunophobia), filth (rhypophobia), disorder (ataxophobia), and the skin or fur of animals (dead or alive? Anyway, it's called doraphobia).

And if you're unfortunate enough to suffer from any of the above, you might also develop acedia, a mental condition characterized by melancholy and apathy. Or you might take out your phobias on food and grow into an adephagiac, or glutton. There are plenty of those around lately.

Here's a condition you definitely don't want the pilot of your commercial flight to suffer from: aerasthenia--fearful, anxious and obsessive-compulsive thinking with a loss of self-confidence and mental worry, a malady not uncommon in the airline industry. Its psychic twin, aeroneurosis, causes gastric problems, nervous irritability and agitation, due to prolonged anoxia (lack of oxygen) and the general anxieties of flying.

Bet you didn't know that sexual sadists and masochists are also called algolagniacs. Or that seniors like me who look unusually young enjoy the "disorder" of agerasia. Only doctors could make a negative out of such a felicitous condition. More popularly known as Dick Clark Syndrome to us Boomers, it's got a good beat and you can dance to it!