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Hey long time, no see. Long time, no hear!

Yes, it’s been a long time, but that doesn’t mean we all haven’t been doing some interesting and cool stuff. I don’t know if it’s interesting or cool, but right now it IS the English Teacher John Show number 49. Hey, it’s trick or treat, and I’m going to trick you into thinking that this show is a real treat.

[intro music]

INTRODUCTION – HALLOWEEN!

Hello everyone. My name is John Koons and I am your host for the English Teacher John Show and our other podcasts, which are produced here in our classroom and studio in Matsumoto, Japan.

Hey, HAPPY HALLOWEEN – about five days too late!!! Yes Halloween was this past week and it’s a pretty fun day and night for kids in the countries that celebrate Halloween. According to Wikipedia, you can find Halloween festivities in many Western countries, especially the United States, Canada, the UK, Ireland, Puerto Rico (part of the U.S.), and with increasing popularity in Australia and New Zealand. Here in Japan, there aren’t many Halloween activites going on but most people know about it. For me and my English students, I do some Halloween vocabulary and worksheets with our kids classes, and I like to play a Halloween song in my university and adult classes. This year I’ve been playing one of my favorites, which is called the “Monster Mash.”

In our show today, we’ll talk about PHOBIAS! These are the things that many or most people are not afraid of, but, for some reason, they really scare us. Are you afraid of heights, spiders, the dark … it’s a bit irrational but some of us, maybe even many of us suffer from these phobias.
And we’re going to finish the podcast with a few famous quotations that may or not be inspirational, introspective, uplifting or interesting for you.

SEGMENT 1 – Talking about PHOBIAS

Hey, are you afraid of the dark? Maybe listening to policiticans gives you goosebumps or makes your

blood run cold? You just can’t look down from the fifth floor window of your office? Ooh, I think you may have a phobia. Let’s go to my favorite online dictionary site, OneLook.com, and see how they define a phobia:

PHOBIA – (noun) an anxiety disorder characterized by extreme and irrational fear of simple things or social situations.

Wow, you can see quite a list at phobialist.com, that’s P-H-O-B-I-A-L-I-S-T-dot-com. Let’s take a peek at some of these:

acrophobia – fear of heights
arachnophobia – fear of spiders
snakephobia or ophidiophobia – Fear of snakes
How about graphophobia, the fear of handwriting.
claustrophobia – the fear of being in small, confined spaces (like being trapped in a closet, or maybe staying in a Japanese capsule hotel).
xenophobia – Fear of strangers or foreigners.
pyrophobia – Fear of fire.

We can ask someone about their fears with questions like this:
Are you afraid of … ?
Are you afraid of heights?
Do you have any phobias?
Are you scared of the dark?
Do you suffer from monophobia, the fear of solitude or being alone.

Yes, I’m scared of the dark.
Yes, I’m afraid of heights.
Yes, I have claustrophobia.
Oh yes. I really don’t like spiders.

How about some other phobias …

Did you know that thermophobia is the fear of heat? (I think I may have that one.) And technophobia is the fear of technology. Cyberphobia is the fear of computers or the internet. Do any of you suffer from technophobia or cyberphobia? Now here’s one that I hope my wife doesn’t have: peladophobia, the fear of bald people!!

I hope that none of you have bibliophobia which is the fear of books. Gamophobia is the fear of marriage. (I knew something about that one a few years ago, B.T., before Tomoko.) Wiccaphobia is not the fear of Wikipedia, but is in fact the fear of witches and witchcraft.

And finally, I think your life would really be a mess if you suffered from panophobia or pantophobia, the fear of EVERYTHING!

SEGMENT 2 – QUOTATIONS

Okay, this is our first time to talk about FAMOUS QUOTATIONS here on the English Teacher John Show.

Pablo Picasso (1881 – 1973), Spanish painter and sculptor
Everything you can imagine is real.

And one of Picasso’s other spoken gems is:
The chief enemy of creativity is good taste. (I think there’s certainly a bit of humor in that one)

Carl Jung – Famous Swiss Psychiatrist (1875 – 1961)
Creative powers can just as easily turn out to be destructive. It rests solely with the moral personality, whether they apply themselves to good things or to bad. And if this is lacking, no teacher can supply it or take its place.

Charles Dickens (1812-1870) British novelist
The whole difference between construction and creation is this; that a thing constructed can only be lovedafter it is constructed; but a thing created is loved before it exists.

Erik Christopher Zeeman (b. 1925) British mathematician
Technical skill is mastery of complexity, while creativity is mastery of simplicity

Oliver Wendell Holmes, Jr. (1841 – 1935) American Supreme Court judge
Man’s mind, stretched to a new idea, never goes back to its original dimensions.

Bertrand Russell (1872 – 1970) British philosopher, writer, logician, and mathematician
Do not fear to be eccentric in opinion, for every opinion now accepted was once eccentric.

Albert Szent-Gyorgyi, a Hungarian who won the 1937 Nobel Prize in Physiology and Medicine
Discovery consists of looking at the same thing as everyone else does and thinking something different.

SIGNOFF

You can find the transcript for this show, and you can also let me know what you think about today’s show,

especially the famous quotations segment. You can post your comments and suggestions on our MYENGLISH BLOG. Besides the blog, you can find all of our video and audio podcasts, more transcripts, otherlanguage help and more, at english teacher john . com. Our email address is podcast-AT-etj.com, and in our next show we’ll read some of your emails.

Thanks for listening and learning. Have a great week and if you find yourself or anyone suffering from “englishteacherjohnshowpodcastophobia,” please tell them that it’s only a temporary condition, that they are not alone in their suffering, and it can usually (but not always!) be cured by downloading the following week’s show.

That’s it for now. Bye bye.

Thanks to Martin Chenhall, our music man.

Posted by English Teacher John on Wednesday, November 8th, 2006 at 11:34 am
Category: ETJ Show, Listening, Transcript. Follow responses to this entry: RSS 2.0 feed.