Have You Got Onychophozomania?

New Zealand Graphic, Volume XLVIII, Issue 6, 7 August 1912, Page 5

Have You Got Onychophozomania?

Big iwmw for li.tle diseases are quite common in the medical profession—an I doubtless afford no little consolation t » the sufferers. A recent issue of the •British Medical Journal” shows that there is the same tendency to gve b:g names to little habits. If you pull or stroke your mustache habitually. you have m usta ch iostr mania. Do you twirl your cane as you walk along?’ Then you are a strepsorhabdomaniae. Your young hopeful, when he puts his finger in his mouth, suffers from stomatodactylomania, and that nervous schoolgirl who bites her nails is an onychophagomaniac. Doubtless r. will shock her to learn that she is so depraved. And the next time you are fidgeted to death by any one who drums on the table with his fingers, or nervously crosses and uncrosses his legs, you can bring him to a sense of the enormity of Ids crime by calling him either a harm oniomaniac or a trepodomaniae, as the case may be. There are even unconscious action' which may be regarded as more or less distinctive of classes. There is the rustic who scratches his head, the horseman who whips his riding-boot, the thinker who finds inspiration in fingering his ’>eard, stroking his nose, or tearing paper to pieces, the heaw dragoon who tug* at

his mo ’-‘.i he, the bored !®tener to a dull lecture aho draws sketches on bh»t ting piper, the swaggerer a ho, in C reagh’s i nmort il phrase, M eune< \ i to the house like a crocodile, with hand in i. s breeches pocket.’’ These mannerism* are ~o h.;b. ; » i they often become necc.-sary a v mp! - i mends of the operation of t'e ::e ! gence. Science ha* given t <* : -manias” to these uneons mr tr and d<>cs not disdain to cla»* :» ‘ . rr itrivial of them under that ‘.mp - head. Thus it is that the -Journa.” »ja ■ the -fearsome diseases’* iu«:. • >:i i above, and neatly concludes: -But are such things worth * it.ilogic ing and naming as 'manias?’ To any one who may think it important tha this should be done we venture to sug gest that ‘onomatomania*—the mar. < for namin’ things—should aided * » the list.”