you do not “have x-omania”
low barrier-to-entry rootwording makes basic white people think that fake medical conditions exist and this is bad
more specifically, there is this problem with the English language where the presence of obvious neologistic possibilities creates a deluge of root word combinations that easily generate words in a more real-seeming way
due to the EASE of combining a prefix for literally anything with -mania, I can generate a large list of words that seem like they've been documented in a medical journal somewhere but which mean something only due to the combination of their roots,
-mania is a suffix that can neutrally mean "abnormally high interest in", which is descriptive, and can be used to also mean "excessive interest in", which is prescriptive
in other words and via these specifically abuseable words, people can then say "I have x-omania" as if they actually saw a doctor and were diagnosed with... melomania, a "craze for music". yeah okay.
(this is ignoring a larger issue, which I've argued a lot, that medical conditions consisting entirety of behaviors and no physiological metrics or biomarkers should not be considered medical conditions and the categorization of behavior-and-only-behavior as a "condition" is concept-crept pseudomedicine to make normative judgments feel more official or true)
here are some other fake not-conditions:
empleomania: excessive desire to hold public office
lypemania: "extreme pathological mournfulness"
potichomania: a "craze for imitating oriental porcelain"
plutomania: excessive or pathological interest in money
and weirdly enough there is
phonomania: “pathological tendency to murder”
which despite seeming the least sensemaking (“there is a non-pathological tendency to murder?”) actually draws a distinction between "pathological" and not-that, which is *a start*, because to be properly scientific about this behavior cannot be pathological by virtue of being merely abnormal or immoral or something we consider evil or whatever.
-mania is in other words not only pseudomedical but a very whitegirl suffix
"like omg you're so totally into with x like just OBSESSED" is interchangeable with "like omg you have x-omania"
take away "excessive" and "obsessive" and "compulsion for" and etc and you have a list of benign interests.
put differently: what determines as "an excessive interest in plants"? the term "excessive" designates a "too much" amount, vs the more descriptive and neutral "abnormally high interest in plants"
I'm going to go out on a limb (or branch h a h a) and say that there is no conceptually rigorous determinant of "excessive" as it pertains to interest in plants, and this is completely made up. because it is.
repeat for every other -mania suffix.
