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
What if, instead of being an inanimate object, a dictionary were alive? That’s the idea behind a lavishly illustrated new children’s book called The Dictionary Story (Bookshop|Amazon) by Oliver Jeffers and Sam Winston. This is part of a...
Chad in Hilliard, Florida, wonders about the expression old as Methuselah, meaning “extremely advanced in years.” The phrase references Methuselah, a figure in Jewish, Islamic, and Christian tradition said to be 969 years old when he...