Aibohphobia: The Fear of Palindromes

        Many of us have very irrational fears that we must deal with every day. Some people are afraid of pickles, spiders, clusters of holes, and jars of mayo (crazy, I know). However, the one fear that we are going to talk about today is the fear of palindromes.  A palindrome is a word or phrase that is the same both forwards and backwards. The made-up term for having this fear is Aibohphobia, which is funny because it is also a palindrome. That seems like the definition of the word torture and whoever came up with that is a very cruel individual.

        This fear isn’t diagnosable as to many psychologists the fear does not actually exist. It is presumably one of the most irrational fears there are because palindromes aren’t exactly harmful, unlike spiders In an article from Health Research Funding, it says “Only meticulous eyes and very minutely monitoring minds will spot that the phrase is a palindrome. Even if you manage to notice it in this article, you would miss out on it had it been printed on a newspaper or just as a notice at the election booth.” So, the odds of running into a palindrome itself is very unlikely and if you were too find it it would mean you were specifically looking for it. That’s like looking for a spider, and who willingly does that? A crazy person, that’s who.

        Psychologists say that this “phobia” was given this name to show that many of our fears are only in our state of minds. Being afraid of palindromes is not exactly a fear that should be taken seriously. It is also not a fear that many people can account having. However, there are many other phobias that, as irrational as they are, have more personal accounts. There was once an episode of Maury where a woman was deathly afraid of pickles. Just the sight of them caused her to cry hysterically and cower in fear. On the show Maury tried to get her to confront her pickle fear because her family was extremely worried about her. As crazy as this sounds this was broadcasted to television and it legitimately threw people through a loop. Towards the end of the episode she seemed to have grown onto the pickles a little. So, despite how terrified and ridiculous her fear was she still conquered it. Therefore, much like the girl on Maury who ran away from a jar of pickles, we can conclude that, much like pickles, not matter how salty our irrational fears are we should not run away from them because they may not be as scary as we think.