Three Words That Should Exist

Just spreading the health, man

This Monday after declining to shake hands with an actor I was jokingly accused of having hypochondria, which I thought was doubly unfair. For one thing I was obviously sick and not just fretting over the possibility, but more importantly the reason I don't touch actors when I'm sick is for their health, not mine... these are people who can't muddle through work with sore throats and a ghastly post-nasal drip. So is it still hypochondria when it's confined to an irrational concern for the health of other people? And a really particular group of people at that. I can't possibly start telling people I have a crippling case of xenohypothespichondria and then explain the whole thing, but it seems like there has to be some succinct way of putting it.

And situations do arise where a brief, natural explanation is necessary, like when I was working the stage door while sick a couple years ago, and I greeted a black actor I'd met previously at a reading. He extended his hand warmly in friendship, and my white guilt made me really afraid of a clumsy excuse to not shake his hand. If I could just spit out "I have xenohespichonthi..." well whatever my condition is called, it'd be much easier and I'd worry less that people thought I didn't want to touch their dirty hands. What me, paranoid?
Startle Without Surprise

There's another word that I've felt needed to exist for a long time, even though I have to give partial credit to The West Wing for stating it first. Every once in a while something unanticipated happens and it's completely startling, but on reflection it's not surprising at all. Like all the seeds were there and maybe if we'd been paying closer attention we would have spotted the signs. It's like (ahem, hypothetical example) finding out somebody with a number of ethical challenges and a sense of entitlement is stealing at work... I might experience a moment the surprise because I hadn't even been thinking about the possibility of anybody stealing. However the surprise is at the general case that anybody's got their hands in the till, and the specific case just seems like a logical conclusion. There has to be a word that captures that feeling, like when a slasher movie killer jumps out from behind a tree... I wasn't expecting him but I suppose I kind of knew he had to be there: startling but not actually surprising.

Synecdoche for Dummies

Maybe I've just known too many alarmingly literal people... well actually that's definitely true. But I get tired of explaining figurative language sometimes. Particularly when I've left out all the precise detail of a mundane job. When I take out the trash, do I really have to explain that I sorted out all the recyclable materials and disposed of them in the proper receptacles, or every once in a while can I just let that be implied? What kills me is having to specify I recycled a worthless piece of cardboard rather than being able to say I threw it away. I'd call it synecdoche, except I always took that term to mean a part standing for the whole, while in this case it's a generalization... the simplest part of the whole category standing in for a more specific one. There ought to be a simple term I can use when rolling my eyes at stupid people besides "Clearly I was speaking synecdochicamally" or whatever the adverb form of synecdoche is.

Am I really asking too much?