awfulizing
v.— «Heard a new word recently and decided I like it. Awfulizing is the practice of thinking something is so horrible and so awful that there’s no other way to feel but depressed, dejected and without hope. Awfulizing drags people into pitiful states of despair—usually needlessly. If you catch yourself awfulizing, stop and ask yourself, “what’s really the worst thing that can possibly happen here?”» —“Bits and bytes to ponder, even avoid” by Kelly Griffith Orlando Sentinel (Florida) July 3, 2005. (source: Double-Tongued Dictionary)
Further reading
It was a dark and stormy night. So begins the long and increasingly convoluted prose of Edwards Bulwer-Lytton’s best-known novel. Today the annual Bulwer-Lytton Contest asks contestants for fanciful first sentences that are similarly...
A caller who grew up in Wisconsin says his spouse, who’s from Florida, teases him for such things as pronouncing bagel like “BEG-el” and dagger as “DEG-ger.” They’re just products of his isolect, the regional variants from his particular dialect of...