There’s something suspicious about the name for a fear of clowns which was on the shortlist of words of the year compiled by Oxford Dictionaries. This phobia, coulrophobia, oddly enough illustrates the meaning of Oxford’s eventual chosen winner: post-truth. Post-truth applies to a circumstance ‘in which objective facts are less influential in shaping public opinion than appeals to emotion’.
Because 2016 saw an outbreak of ‘creepy-clown’ behaviour (with America swamped by people dressed as clowns lurking in the shadows, armed with samurai swords), there has been a demand for a learned word derived from Greek to designate the fear of them. It is like fear of the number 13, given the contrived name triskaidekaphobia in 1911 in an article in Abnormal Psychology by I.H. Coriat, who had interesting ideas about the use of psychoanalysis to treat stammering and homosexuality.
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