Onomatomania

We just passed the winter solstice, and these dark and claustrophobic days have turned us into bibliomanic lexiconophiles. I'd like to continue our vocabulary obsessions by sharing a word I recently learned: onomatomania, which refers to the involuntary recollection of a phrase.

"Two eggs a dozen", for example, recently lodged in my brain like a watermelon in a toilet.

On a related note (bear with me here--this is going to get graphic and disgusting--but I do have a point and I will try to edit out the bad words), a buddy of mine suffered a temporary spell of impotence triggered by involuntary imagery. Every time he was about to, er, "matriculate", he envisioned a, er, "pencil" (more specifically, the head of his uncircumcised "pencil" with the hood pulled back), being sliced vertically by a razor blade. Apparently, that killed the mood.

Is there a word that generalizes these mental ticks, referring not only to onatomania and compulsive images, but also to songs stuck in your head and olfactory hallucinations?

Speaking of which, why are fake smells, of all these phenomenon, regulated to bad weirdness like epilepsy and stroke? Other mental ticks, like phantom phone rings, are so bizarrely common that they're written off to, "Dude ... workin' too hard?!", but phantom smells are just unheard of outside of serious problems. I mean, I've had some weird shit get stuck in my head, like I've recently been hung up on this observation: have you noticed, or is it just me, that some cars (when viewed from behind) lean to one side--but always to the left!?!? ... but I've never had a smell stuck in my head. Heck, I can barely even conjure up the memory of a scent, though I can recall all sorts of stupid trivia, for example, just off the top of head I can tell you that back in the mid-1970s scientists were stumped by the challenge of making fake banana taste.

But then there's "two eggs a dozen": stuck in my head like a watermelon in a toilet.

What gives?

(p.s., Thank you, once again, to WordSmith.org for stoking my bibliomania! The image, by the way, is from YouTube, but I'm not putting up a link here since this post is kind of gross and the video was made by a couple of kids.)

Objektophilie, Otaku, & Biophilia

Funny how life works. Only a couple days after I posted ad nauseam about Objektophilie, I learn that a Japanese fellow, known as SAL9000, married an avatar.

The Telegrapher tells the tale of how the gamer came to marry his sweetheart.

Googling this story led me to a tale in the New York Times about Nisan, another Japanese fellow, who married a pillow case. The story noted that:

"Nisan is part of a thriving subculture of men and women in Japan who indulge in real relationships with imaginary characters. These 2-D lovers, as they are called, are a subset of otaku culture— the obsessive fandom that has surrounded anime, manga and video games in Japan in the last decade. It’s impossible to say exactly what portion of otaku are 2-D lovers, because the distinction between the two can be blurry."

Let me be clear: I think that Nisan and SAL9000 are engaging in activities that are fundamentally different from objectophilia. But they are blurring some lines, and the "fundamental" bit of the difference between objectophilia and biophilia is, I think, becoming fuzzy.

If Japan is the future, it's clear where we're headed. Once robots look, act, and f^ck like people, will there still be words for objectophilism and otaku?

Objektophilie

Yesterday I wrote a post on the German word "Plaztangst", which translates to "place fear", and I asked if there was antonym for the term, a word that captured the feeling of giddy, sexual love for places. The Chronic and fellow LoSer Daurade both brought "objectum-sexual" (OS) to bear, pointing me to a documentary, "The Woman Who Married the Eiffel Tower." Daurade provided links to part 1 and part 2 of the documentary and offered the following critique:

Very interesting documentary, from what I saw, but apparently the OS community is pretty unhappy with it:

"You can see the difference because I am choppy and uptight in the UK film like I am reading my lines. I didn't like the director nor did I like the woman I was being filmed with because she was too overt about her sex with little regard to consequence.

In [a different film], I completely respected and trusted the director and I was free to speak with no pressure and no incessant questions about sex, nor staged sex scenes."

[...]

Also, the BBC doc is wrong....not all members of the OS community are women....

Daurade also offered a link to a fascinating website on OS that is maintained by the OS community, a community that was apparently gathered by a Swedish woman who married the Berlin Wall and helped coin the Latin-based phrase, "objectum-sexual". The website offers "Objektophil" as the Germanic translation of the phrase, which would suggest rendering "place love" as "Platzphil"; while a quick Googling brings up no relevant results, there are, humorously, irrelevant results based on the name "Phil Platz", which is way cooler than my "The Gid" dumboniker.

As it turns out, the website's home page seems to spell the German word wrong (or else this bibliophile misread it). It's actually "Objektophilie", and it, too, has its own website.

Surely advertisers study this stuff closely--at least 9 credits in OS studies must be required for a Masters degree? This is hardly non-mainstream stuff--I don't watch too much TV (rather, just enough), but I dug Boston Legal, which ran a number of episodes exploring OS (BL had, stereotypically--aren't I self-righteous?--an autistic woman). Autism seems, to me, a key to OS, the key to opening up an alternative view of "things" and "not things"--but what do I know?

I, in my ignorance, can only conclude that as advertisers become more scientific, they will slowly bring us all into the OS fold. Computer porn seems borderline close, but enough off the mark to be kind of missing the point. I think, too, that dildos are not, generally, loved, but, like porn, a vehicle for encouraging lustful thoughts.

For a more accurate example of the consumer as OS, i.e., love, love, loving an object, think of the Apple Community and see this here, tale of near heart-, er, iPhone-, break. Is it any wonder that Apple tries to keep porn off the iPhone? Its like ... the phone's the Objektophilie here--stop looking at that naked woman!

Platzangst

Platzangst is a German word, combining "platz" for "place" with "angst" for "fear" -- literally, "place fear."

It's a delicious word for us at LoS, with our obsessions over place and meaning. "Place fear" in English sounds like a reference to a haunting--a specific place that is feared or that generates fear--but Platzangst is more generalized. Plaztangst originally fell along the line of agoraphobia, and it has curiously grown even broader in usage, now encompasing claustrophobia as well. Somehow, though, agoraphobia and claustrophobia are both probably even more specific than Platzangst. There are many place fears that are not quite named in English: some people suffer panic attacks when passing others on sidewalks; others cannot cross an empty road; and then there are those who grow uneasy, increasingly uneasy, if they sense something near their head just out of the line of sight unless they are wearing a hat or touching their foreheads. This list of place fears is only limited by the number of people on Earth. Platzangst captures all of these and more--much better than any term I know in English.

I wonder, though, what is the opposite of Platzangst--what is the word for Place Love? I don't mean "place love" as in, "Hey I really dig this place! What a great view! Feels like home! I love it here!"

I mean dirty love--pure raunch. I mean a person who gets off on "place"--perhaps open or closed, or perhaps something even more specifically situated in space. I'm sure that there are plenty of claustrophiles--are there also agroraphiles? What sort of culture would require such words?

Merry Christmas, Mr. Weishaupt!

Lots of Holiday Cheer from
your friends, the Illuminati.

;)