| apophenia | n. | Misspelling |
| Definition: See apophrenia | ||
| Etiology: Spelled this way, apophenia is documented in English only in a brutally rational editorialization published in The Skeptic's Dictionary (TSD) and repeated in one or two other, perhaps insufficiently discriminant online sources. (Consult your favorite Web search engine for details.) TSD attributes the word to "K. Conrad (1958)." Unquestionably, this attribution refers to Die Beginnende Schizophrenie: Versuch einer Gestaltanalyse des Wahns of Professor Klaus Conrad (1958). And equally beyond question, Conrad's spelling of this word represents a simple orthographical error, either his or his publisher's. The root "phen-" is not found in psychological contexts in either German or scientific Greek (while the prefix "apo-" is unmistakably Greek). What Conrad intended, then, was certainly apophrenia, which readers of that entry in this Glossary will see makes excellent linguistic sense and, perhaps more importantly to the balance of uneseen forces in the universe, harmonizes well with the title of Conrad's book, not to mention the rest of 20th Century psychological literature. | ||
| Mind-Boggling Coincidence: The British rock group, The Who,
in titling their 1973 album, Quadrophenia, one of the first
vinyl recordings to support quadrophonic sound, made an orthographic
error astonishingly identical to that of Professor Conrad. The Who's
intent was undoubtedly to
allude enticingly to a "doubled" form of schizophrenia (a term
popularly thought in those more pure and innocent days to connote a
split personality or mind, rather than merely denoting one), madness
being then, moreso than now, a goal to which the record-buying
adolescent public eagerly aspired. That The Who should have dropped the "r" in "phrenia" in precisely the same way Professor Conrad did, probably almost exactly fifteen years later (fifteen being almost exactly half—i.e., an even "split" or "schism"—of the approximate number of days in the average calendrical month) is a coincidence that even the most staunch, tunnel-visioned rationalist will be forced to admit represents a sign or portent of unquestionable infranatural significance. Through an exhaustive search of English reference works, the author of this Glossary has established that the words apophenia and quadrophenia represent the two sole occurrences of the element "phenia" in that language. |
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