Steven Pinker -- How the Mind Works - Hampshire High Italian ...

386 HOW THE MIND WORKSTHE SMELL OF FEARLanguage-lovers know that there is a word for every fear. Are you afraidof wine? Then you have oenophobia. Tremulous about train travel? Yousuffer from siderodromophobia. Having misgivings about your mother-inlawis pentheraphobia, and being petrified of peanut butter sticking tothe roof of your mouth is arachibutyrophobia. And then there's FranklinDelano Roosevelt's affliction, the fear of fear itself, or phobophobia.But just as not having a word for an emotion doesn't mean that itdoesn't exist, having a word for an emotion doesn't mean that it doesexist. Word-watchers, verbivores, and sesquipedalians love a challenge.Their idea of a good time is to find the shortest word that contains all thevowels in alphabetical order or to write a novel without the letter e. Yetanother joy of lex is finding names for hypothetical fears. That is wherethese improbable phobias come from. Real people do not tremble at thereferent of every euphonious Greek or Latin root. Fears and phobias fallinto a short and universal list.Snakes and spiders are always scary. They are the most commonobjects of fear and loathing in studies of college students' phobias, andhave been so for a long time in our evolutionary history. D. O. Hebbfound that chimpanzees born in captivity scream in terror when they firstsee a snake, and the primatologist Marc Hauser found that his laboratorybredcotton-top tamarins (a South American monkey) screamed out alarmcalls when they saw a piece of plastic tubing on the floor. The reaction offoraging peoples is succinctly put by Irven DeVore: "Hunter-gatherers willnot suffer a snake to live." In cultures that revere snakes, people still treatthem with great wariness. Even Indiana Jones was afraid of them!The other common fears are of heights, storms, large carnivores,darkness, blood, strangers, confinement, deep water, social scrutiny, andleaving home alone. The common thread is obvious. These are the situationsthat put our evolutionary ancestors in danger. Spiders and snakesare often venomous, especially in Africa, and most of the others are obvioushazards to a forager's health, or, in the case of social scrutiny, status.Fear is the emotion that motivated our ancestors to cope with the dangersthey were likely to face.Fear is probably several emotions. Phobias of physical things, of social