To the Lions' dinner meeting last night, where the President presented us with a quiz sheet for our amusement. Amusement be blowed! The quiz consisted of a list of 20 phobias and we had to answer "Of what are these phobias?" I think maybe my Californian friend has fallen prey to pogonophobia (I'd never heard of it until last night), although I haven't. Some were not too difficult to guess (hypnophobia - frear of sleep; pyrophobia - fear of fire) but vestiophobia? Spheksophobia?
Then we discovered that there were another 20 questions on the other side of the paper! "To what creatures do these collective nouns refer?" A clowder of...? A bale of... (not hay, but turtles).
I amazed myself by getting the highest score - 13 out of 40.
Which is considerably better than the mark I gained in a chemistry exam when I was 14. I got 2%, or one out of 50 - and that was for getting my name right at the top of the paper! I dropped chemistry after that, much to the relief of the staff of the science department.
Vestiophobia - fear of clothing; spheksophobia - fear of wasps. A clowder of cats. And I didn't guess any of those three!
When I first saw pogonophobia, I immediately thought of cartoonist Walt Kelly and his comic strip, Pogo, with its all time favorite line, "We have met the enemy and he is us."
ReplyDeleteI also remember that at least one character each month would say something like, "Friday the 13th is on Monday this month."
Anyway, I knew that I couldn't possibly suffer from pogonophobia, even if it has nothing to do with the comic strip.
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