It’s that time again my auditory adventurers! Another episode of An Assemblage of Grandiose and Bombastic Grandiloquents is before you! So what is today’s word, you might be asking? Today’s word is onomatomania onomatomania onomatomania!
Now you might be thinking to yourself, is my listening device broken? Why on earth did our trusty host repeat that word so many times? And I will tell you! Onomatomania is the irresistible desire to repeat certain words or sounds. Ahhh, now you see what I did there!
Onomatomania can also be described as an abnormal obsession with a particular word which the person uses repeatedly, or which intrudes into consciousness. Essentially, it’s something your mind or mouth is repeating over and over and over and over and over. I’ve done it again. Wink.
Onomatomania is a Latin word that emerged in the late 19th century from the onomato meaning ‘word’ and mania meaning ‘compulsion or obsession’. Onomatomania can also mean "fear of a word" or "frustration at not being able to think of a word." So if something is right on the tip of your tongue, but you can’t quite place it, you might have onomatomania. Another definition is ‘an irrational motive for performing trivial or repetitive actions, even against your will.’ If you have the strange compulsion to touch the top of a door frame everytime you pass through it by jumping up in the air and slapping it disruptively with your dirty hand, you might surmise that you are suffering from onomatomania. Just saying.
Mania, interestingly, derives from late Middle English, via late Latin from Greek, and means literally ‘madness’, which in turn comes from ‘mainesthai’ which means to ‘be mad’. Nowadays we tag ‘mania’ on the ends of things that have become successful in popular culture, such as the 1960s movement ‘Beatlemania’ - even though the word mania evolved from someone who is mad, or perhaps crazy. An interesting concept, no?
Isn’t language wonderful?
