When Passions Go Too Far

You are in your bed, snuggled up in your cozy PJs with your face buried in your pillow. Your eyes are slowly closing as your brain sifts through all the thoughts of the day, powering down for a good night’s sleep. Then, it hits you! That one thought that has lodged itself in your mind that you just can’t shake. It has been popping up all day long, all week long (really all year when it comes down to it), and you just can’t let it go. You sit back up, relinquish the sleep that was almost in your grasp, and dwell on that piece of your being that has become a focal point of your entire identity.

We have all experienced this at one point or other. We call these experiences by many names: passions, hobbies, interests, or plagues, but it all comes down to one simple idea: obsession. In the 19th century, some of these obsessions observed in asylum patients led to a new psychological diagnosis for individuals who otherwise seemed normal, but just had one area in their life they seemed to focus on beyond all rational explanation. This term was monomania.

The word itself is an old term, coming from the Greek “monos”, which can mean isolated (originally from the Indo-European root suffix men-) and the Greek and Latin “mania”, referring to madness or insanity. Perhaps it is not surprising that such a straightforward word was mostly out of use by the end of 1800s, less than a century after its introduction. Such a broad term really tells you nothing at all about the specific condition of a patient. More specific diagnoses such as kleptomania or pyromania rose up to take its place. I can’t say today that this diagnosis has found much popularity in modern psychiatry either, but the idea of having just one thing of interest that you eat, sleep, and breathe is not at all a foreign concept to me.

One of my many obsessions is the origins of the words I hear, use, or stumble across on a regular basis. I am an avid reader (don’t think bookworm, think more book-anaconda), and hobby writer, and I have had a fascination since a young age with the language I speak, and its rich history. Until now, my introversion has encouraged the vast amounts of information I’ve uncovered over the years to be kept for my own selfish private enjoyment. But as I age (much too quickly), I’ve decided the time has come to unleash that knowledge to the world, thrown in with maybe some glimpses of my boring young adult life. Thus, the idea for Word Monomania came into being. I hope that I can bring to light some forgotten histories of new and old words; some that we see on a daily basis and just never give much thought, and others that we should use on a daily basis but somehow they have become almost obsolete. Through my linguistic explorations and stream-of-consciousness musings, I also hope to tie in real life examples that allow readers to come to the conclusion more often that not that they are not “the only one” who thinks that. And maybe there will be some lighthearted fun facts to pick up along the way.   From one monomaniac to another, thank goodness for the internet, a new way to air out all of those pesky obsessions that make each us who we really are (whether we own up to them or not).