Ergophobia

Part of speech: noun

Definitions

1. An intense fear of work or employment
2. A pathological dread of labor or occupational activities
3. An irrational anxiety about working or engaging in work-related tasks

Etymology: Hidden inside this mock-learned word is the plain English word "work." The Greek "ergon," "work, deed," and the English "work" are cousins, both descended from the same ancient root, reconstructed as *werg-. One branch came down through Germanic into Old English "weorc." The other passed through Greek and returned centuries later in borrowed form, in "energy," "organ," "liturgy" and "surgery," which is literally "hand-work." The second half has its own twist. In Homer, Greek "phobos" meant less "fear" than "panicked flight," the rout of an army running from battle. It later settled into "fear" and was turned into "-phobia," "morbid dread." Ancient medicine already knew "hydrophobia," the horror of water seen in rabies. But "-phobia" became a fashion only in the 19th century, when physicians began naming anxieties one by one. Carl Westphal coined "Agoraphobie" in 1871, and "claustrophobia" followed by the end of that decade. This word belongs to that boom, but it is not an ancient term. It is a modern coinage, assembled by the early 1900s from the Greek combining forms "ergo-" and "-phobia," dressing a very old human tendency in clinical Greek. From the start it carried a wink. It has served less as a diagnosis than as a learned-sounding jab at the idle, a way of calling someone lazy while pretending to pity them. Its siblings took the root in other directions. "Allergy" was coined in 1906 by the Viennese pediatrician Clemens von Pirquet from "allos," "other," and "ergon," to mean an altered reaction of the body. "Ergonomics," the science of fitting work to the worker, followed in 1949. So the same Greek word now names how we work, how our bodies react, and the dread some claim at the thought of working at all.

Synonyms: ergasiophobia, work phobia