Home Subjects Archives Quotations
Search: Search Tips

hurry sickness n. A malaise where a person feels chronically short of time, and so tends to perform every task faster and to get flustered when encountering any kind of delay.

Example Citation:
The microwave oven is one of the modern objects that convey the most elemental feeling of power over the passing seconds. You watch those seconds, after all, as they tick past on the digital display. If you suffer from hurry sickness in its most advanced stages, you may find yourself punching eighty-eight seconds instead of ninety because it is faster to tap the same digit twice.
—James Gleick, Faster, Random House, 1999

Notes:
The term hurry sickness was coined back in the 1950s when the cardiologists Meyer Friedman and Ray Rosenman were researching personality types. By 1959 they had refined this to the now-classic Type A personality, a key element of which was a "harrying sense of time urgency."

Related Words:
background
beeper medicine
continuous partial attention
cup-holder cuisine
dashboard dining
deskfast
drive-through cuisine
hit-and-run nursing
home meal replacement
leisure sickness
one-handed food
speed scratch
type T personality
underload syndrome
upshifter
velocitize

Subject Categories:
Culture - General
Culture - Health and Fitness
Culture - Time

Posted on February 4, 2000


 Recent posts:
  jingle mail
  tuxeda
  boreout
  scuppie
  allergy bullying
  IMBY
  agflation
  mullet strategy
  walkshed
  daughter track
 Alphabetical archives:
  A B C D E F G H I
  J K L M N O P Q R
  S T U V W X Y Z #
 Other links:
Top 100 Words

Recent Words

Recent Quotes

Word Spy, The Book

Word Spy Citations

Feedback

My Favorite Words

My Neologisms

Paul McFedries



Copyright © 1995 - 2008 Paul McFedries and Logophilia Limited