Thursday, November 29, 2007

Hexakosioihexekontahexaphobia.

Today was phobia day in Psychology. I took a list of phobias from the internet (http://phobialist.com/) and read them off to the class for them to guess. Got some really interesting responses. I chose to skip a few of them, (Eurotophobia, Medorthophobia, Oneirogmophobia, Paraphobia, Parthenophobia, Phallophobia and other fun ones), because I really wanted to avoid the possible responses. It was a lot of fun. We got into some interesting discussions about the origins of words, and what to look for. Several students noticed the piece "hex" three times in the title here, and correctly guessed it was the fear of the number 666. Oh, and one of my favorites, for all you Jr. & High School teachers out there : Ephebiphobia- Fear of teenagers. I told them I suffered from that, and a couple asked "So, why are you a teacher?" Well, uh, maybe I was just kidding? Freshmen!

1 comment:

A Paperback Writer said...

They gave us triksadecaphobia (I think that's it -- fear of Friday the 13th, anyway) last year in an academic game. We got it right. Cool, huh?