Unbuttoned

I have heard of many officially named fears or dreads, from aerophobia (a genuine ancient Greek medical term for the fear of air, as registered by the Afro-Roman physician Caelius Aurelianus in his Acute Diseases 3.12.108) to zoophobia (a nineteenth-century word created to describe a psychological aversion to animals).

Alongside the well-known arachnophobia and xenophobia lie twentieth-century neologisms like ergophobia (coined by the surgeon W.D. Spanton in 1905 to describe a preference for leisure over work) or mycophobia (coined in the 1960s to describe an aversion to mushrooms).

Most terms observe the accepted rules of grammar, whereby words derived from ancient Greek and Latin should stick entirely to one language or the other. Consequently, the suffix phobia, as an ancient Greek word, requires its prefixes to similarly derive from ancient Greek. The most famous exception, for a long time the only exception (namely, television) proves the rule.

However, more recent neologisms, either from ignorance or rebelliousness, have flouted the rule by pairing phobia with non-Greek prefixes. Arthur Koestler's coining of the term feminophobia springs to mind, or the frivolous bogyphobia (isn’t everyone “bogyphobic”? surely that’s the point of a bogeyman), or even the puzzling coulrophobia, invented in the 1990s to describe a fear of clowns. Incidentally, the Oxford English Dictionary have thrown their hands up in despair of ever working out where that prefix is supposed to have come from, since the ancient Greeks called their clowns sklêropaiktai (σκληροπαῖκται) or skôptolai (σκωπτόλαι).

Finally ... the buttons

Today, I encountered a new one — koumpounophobia. Interestingly, neither the OED nor Merriam-Webster register this word. It supposedly means a fear of buttons.

A Spectator article of 22 November 2014 claims that Steve Jobs, co-founder of Apple, suffered from it, “or at least a strong aversion, which explains his affinity for touch-screens and turtlenecks”. So perhaps more of an intolerance than a debilitating fear, like Dr Spanton’s work-averse ergophobics.

I must admit to having scratched my head for a while over this word. Where on earth did the koumpouno prefix come from? There is no ancient Greek word that’s even slightly similar. But it turns out that κουμπώνω (thus, koumpono, not koumpouno) is a modern Greek verb meaning to fasten a garment using κουμπιά (koumpia) or buttons. Whoever coined the term has actually invented a modern Greek word (not an English word) for the fear of buttoning something up. In English, we should probably stick to “button phobia” (on analogy with the likes of commitment phobia, computer phobia, and Europhobia).

Beware the internet

Along the way, I found yet another instance of why the internet is not a reliable guide in this post-truth world.

The CPD Online College (who are, understandably, a little wary of telling us exactly who they are, although worryingly, they list HM Government and the NHS amongst their “clients and partners”) claims that “Koumpouno means ‘bean or button’, as the ancient Greeks used beans in the place of buttons” — really?! (Incidentally, the commonest ancient Greek word for a bean is κύαμος, kuamos.)

The above illustrations show that, far from using beans (how is this even possible?!), the ancient Greeks did indeed use buttons, for we are looking at four ancient Greek bronze Gorgoneion buttons from the collection of the British Museum. Such buttons were used to fasten the sleeves of the garment known as a chiton, as the second illustration (from Thomas Hope’s Costume of the Greeks and Romans of 1812) shows. (The objects are certainly buttons, as they have a loop at the back for fastening onto fabric.)

The Gorgoneion (“Gorgon’s head”) was intended to avert evil. Now that’s worthy of a phobia.