LAST year Feedback noted the irony of a website offering help to people with a phobia of phones that advises sufferers to make a phone call (21 April 2007). Kipp Lynch dug a little deeper. “While scrolling the alphabetical list of phobias in the ‘p’ section of ,” he writes, “I came across pupaphobia fear of puppets.”
Inspired by this discovery, we went looking for our favourite phobia. Oddly, there appears to be no entry for sesquipedaliophobia but there is one for its very grown-up synonym hippopotomonstrosesquipedaliophobia, defined as “a persistent, abnormal, and unwarranted…
