Word: hypochondriac
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Dates: during 1980-1989
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...Mencken, the iconoclastic journalist who delighted in debunking the "booboisie," is being debunked himself. An abridged version of his diaries will arrive in bookstores this month. In journal entries written between 1930 and 1948, Mencken emerges as a hypochondriac with an anti-Semitic streak. In one passage he noted that a house on his street had been bought by "some Jews . . . with various ratty tenants." In a segment that the editor omitted, Mencken referred to two Baltimore businessmen as "dreadful kikes...
Charles Bodeck, a retired autoworker, had been assured by doctors that he was not infected and that it is virtually impossible to pass the disease to another person. But Bodeck, described by relatives as a hypochondriac, did not believe them. When police found him, his mailbox was jammed with material describing the disease. Police also found a slip confirming that Bodeck had an appointment next week for yet another Lyme-disease test...
...necks and sore wrists. A California city worker says that after entering data into a VDT for six months, seven hours a shift, she developed migraines, temporary blindness and shoulder pains. "A lot of people don't take it seriously," she contends. "They think it's a lot of hypochondriac women complaining all the time. Those are people who don't work with computers all day." Researchers believe that some of the visual problems stem from too much glare on the screen, which can be alleviated with filters and indirect lighting...
...characters of mother and daughter are completely overshadowed by the story's half-mad protagonist, serpentile in his stealthy pedophilia. The mother, meanwhile, is reduced to the stereotype of the hypochondriac nag, while the daughter--behind the violet mist of the poetic physical description--is no more than a cute, slightly buck-toothed kid on roller skates...
...life crisis, the one that happens when you can no longer hide the fact that mid-life is actually disappearing and you are about to be irrevocably old. He is aquiver with outrage over this unseemly development. Harvey has other specific worries: he is impotent; he is a hypochondriac; he is self-pitying because as an architect he has become only prosperous, not great. In the course of the weekend he flirts with suicide, Roman Catholicism, other women and fortune telling -- everything but an honest confrontation with himself...