875: Phobias May 1, 2017

'Phobia' in general refers to an extreme aversion or fear of something, but what makes someone phobic as opposed to merely afraid comes down to the cause of this feeling. If the fear is irrational, then it can be called a phobia, so while there's 'claustrophobia' meaning 'fear of cramped places', and 'hippopotomonstrosesquippedaliophobia' which is the fear of long words, there is no 'murderer-phobia', so to speak (it could otherwise perhaps be 'dolofoniaphobia') because murderers are reasonably feared. Some phobias, like 'arachnophobia' (fear of spiders) or 'cynophobia' (fear of dogs) have some logic to them, but someone truly phobic would not need logical or experiential reasoning. With that being said, 'homophobia', first appearing in the 1960's, and 'transphobia', first appearing in the 1990's, are, thought of this way, legitimate phobias in that they do describe an irrational and acute aversion to something.