Syndromes We Don't Have a Name For 2

Macramé bridesmaid syndrome

Making your bridesmaids all wear the same hideous dress.

Progress goes into reverse (For women in Saudi Arabia.)

An offer you must refuse (You must come to lunch sometime – drop in any time you’re passing...)


Changing your tune when your lies are exposed by incontrovertible evidence (A hospital that gave parents the wrong baby claimed that a swap couldn’t possibly have happened because it had rigorous procedures in place. After DNA tests, it changed its tune.)

But my point holds: Carrying on saying “Protest never changed anything” when there are multiple examples going back centuries of protest changing things.

Amazement at the existence of other points of view


Tiny separatist idealistic community (see the early feminists)
Tiny separatist idealistic community tears itself apart (see the early feminists)

Having an entire conversation in which you mishear a vital word.

pendulum of fashion: "First names for parents are in vogue from time to time." (Miss Manners)

Solving the Greek debt crisis from your armchair
Calling for the abolition of money

His great coup – never repeated – was to spot a Tintoretto in a local auction in 1964 and pick it up for £40.

"The less well-known the author, the more inflated their ego." (The Age of Uncertainty)

job theft: A filches the project B was going to do, takes over a task B has done for years etc., grabs the paperwork when B is off sick.

"A future that was subsequently cancelled." (Darran Anderson)

Galicia: unlucky recipient of Eisenman’s City of Culture, a massive and costly white elephant (@ArchReview)

pushing your luck
spoiled dauphin syndrome (the Observer on Clarkson)
He was never the same after that.
high-handed rule by an arrogant inner group (If Walls Could Talk, Lucy Worsley)

social suicide: You are a social butterfly, a member of the inner circle, but one day you do something disastrous and you lose your position for ever. (Truman Capote wrote a bitchy, thinly veiled novel about his grand friends, who never spoke to him again.)

Mysterious jobs where you have nothing to do, but they don’t sack you.

People beg you to join some organisation, holding up a fun, glamorous role. Soon you realise they just wanted someone to do the boring jobs.

joining a group and making it serve your own purposes

joining a group with the aim of taking it over and giving yourself an important role or even a paying job
A popular charmer is simply lovely to everybody, apart from the one person he keeps as a punch bag.

"Lose interest in a project as soon as it shows signs of success." (@steveparnell)

co-narcissism: personality created by narcissistic parents
parentification: turning your child into your parent

When a church becomes too liberal, a reactionary splinter group splits off. (Results: a) reactionary group dies off b) liberal church is now too small to survive. c) liberal church joins up with other tiny liberal churches which have gone through the same process.)

presentism: "Homo Heidelbergensis walked like us." (We walk like him.)

More here.