Morbid Fascination

Hi, you have A Way with Words.

Howdy, this is David Cobb calling from Eureka, California.

Howdy, David.

Hi, David. How are you doing?

That’s Eureka, California by way of Texas.

I hear it. I hear it.

Welcome to the program.

I am hoping to get some help.

There is, I think, a word, and I believe there’s a perfect word to describe that sense of morbid fascination that we feel.

You’re driving by an automobile accident.

You know you shouldn’t look, you’re not going to look, and at the last moment you find yourself looking over and staring.

Huh.

That feeling that you get, you don’t want to be looking, but you look.

And it doesn’t have to be visual.

It’s also come up when you say, ooh, this smells horrible.

Here, smell this.

And you try to get somebody else to smell it.

Right.

Right.

Or you turn on the tube and they’re political commentators.

Same thing, right?

Yeah.

Shut up, you.

You’ve got to come listen to this idiot.

Exactly. Yeah, why do people do that? This tastes terrible. Try it. That is weird.

We doubt our own experience.

I will share with you, this has come up from time to time with me, this phenomenon.

And each time, I feel like there is a word, a perfect word.

And actually, I think it’s from, I don’t know if it’s Attic Greek, but for some reason in the back of my head,

I’ve got the notion that this word is either of Greek origin or Latin origin.

I suppose that’s probably true for most of our words,

But I’ve got it in the back of my mind that there’s actually a word to describe this,

But for the life of me, I can’t come up with it.

And for the last 10 or 15 years, it’s actually come up from time to time,

And it always stumps me.

I have a word for you that is Greek in origin that might be the one that you want,

Although it’s a little severe for things like sharing spoiled milk with your housemates.

It’s thanatophilia, T-H-A-N-A-T-O-P-H-I-L-I-A, thanatophilia.

And it means an undue fascination with death.

And it comes from the Greek thanatos, meaning death.

Right, thanatos, meaning death.

Thanatos, I’m sorry.

Yeah, and we get the word euthanasia from the same root, good death.

You know, I bet that that may have actually been it.

Really?

Because I did study a, occurring to me that in my undergraduate studies,

At the University of Houston, we had a Greek professor,

And so that may be why I’m signing the memory is specifically around a horrible auto accident

And wanting to look at it anyway.

But the element of wanting to share it with other people makes me think of another word,

Which is algophilia, which is a morbid pleasure in the pain either of oneself or of others.

There’s something a little sadistic about that, I guess.

There’s a German word, Schotzenfrau, that’s similar to this.

Well, there’s schadenfreude, which is joy in another’s pain.

And, yeah, what was that word, Grant?

Algophilia?

Algophilia.

You can break that down into its components part, right?

Pain and then philia.

Sure, like an analgesic takes away pain.

And nostalgia is the pain of not being able to return.

Right, exactly.

Yeah.

So those are the candidates.

And there’s also something, this is even further afield,

But the word macabre has something to do, I believe,

With wanting to view the remains of a car accident.

Again, it doesn’t have anything to do with sharing the moldy food from your refrigerator

Or wanting to share some terrible car wreck of a TV show.

Right?

Right.

I will say that, again, the concept is not so much sharing it with somebody else

But just the morbid fascination associated with it.

Yeah.

And so it, but I will confess that neither of the two words, although they’re certainly

Candidates, are definitely words that would make me say, aha, I actually knew that word.

I mean, I would like to pretend like I knew those words, but if I was honest with you

And myself, I would say those are not words in my vocabulary.

But morbid fascination, the two-word compound, that does the job for you, right?

It’s just that you feel like you, you think you’re remembering that there’s a single word

For this concept that might be a bit shorter.

That is exactly right.

And the reason that I’m thinking that it may have been the first one

Is because I had in the back of my head that it comes from Greek,

And I thought I was remembering some conversation or some lecture

At some point that was used to describe that phenomenon.

I don’t have it.

Maybe some of our listeners will have it.

They’ll know the word, possibly Greek origin, means morbid fascination, right?

Right.

Well, I will be listening on KHSU radio, and if one of the other listeners of the program does know, I’d love to hear it.

But in the meantime, you’re right.

The two words, morbid fascination, will have to suffice.

Okay, thank you so much for your call, David.

We’ll put the call out, and we’ll talk about the answers we get on a future show, okay?

Fantastic. Thanks so much.

Okay. Bye, David.

So much to explore here, so many things, so many different ways that this could go in trying to uncover these words.

Do you start looking by the Greek root?

To just kind of look for everything that ends in the word philia.

Or mania, yeah.

Or mania, a lot of different ways to take this.

But you know the shortcut, Martha, is the telephone line.

Give us a call, 1-877-929-9673,

If you think you have the answer to David’s question,

Or send us an email to words@waywordradio.org.