The English language is a rich, fruity wench, generously endowed with hundreds of thousands of engorgingly apposite words of numerous lengths that describe all manner of interesting sensations, experiences and situations. In everyday life we usually find ourselves more than sated by her generous offerings but there are certain times when, no matter how hard or how eagerly we grope, the usual fecund offerings from her willing mouth simply do not satisfy. In the same way that Japanese has ' bakku-shan' (a girl who appears pretty from behind but not from the front), there are certain words that you didn't know were in need of invention until one day you find yourself desperately scrabbling around for them.

One such need is a word to describe the phenomena by which the personality faults of others that you yourself do not possess are considered much less acceptable than your own; tolerable, benign and occasionally even desirable as your own clearly are. Therefore your possessiveness, insecurity, sentimentality, jealousy, slowness and irrationality are nothing less than symptoms of the most contemptible kind of intellectual feebleness worthy of professional attention and my laziness, impatience, sloppiness, fickleness, irresponsibility, clumsiness and snobbery are at worst amusing signs of eccentricity and at best positively charming personality quirks.

It was a tough, bloody race, but in the end I think hypochondria just beats irrationality for the top slot in my chart of twenty annoying ways people can behave that makes me want to rub their foreheads up and down a brick wall in a lively fashion while doing my best to convince them that their parents never loved them. This is possibly because once, just once and under the gravest and most Amnesty-condemning of tortures I might be prepared to admit to having displayed for the briefest of times the characteristics of an illogical thought, but I am the very opposite of a hypochondriac in every way possible that even the merest suggestion from someone that they sneezed so they might have the flu is enough to get my hopping up and down on one foot and shaking my fist at the sky.

Another state of being with no appropriate description; the Urban Dictionary defines it as 'hyperchondria' but I think I'd prefer to call it Black Knight Syndrome; my arms and legs could be cast to the four winds and I'd still be insisting that 'twas nothing but a scratch. The pain in my stomach is in fact attributable to the seven doughnuts I had for lunch and isn't a hernia about to erupt. The tingle in my toe is directly traceable to my six inch heels and not a sign of impending stroke. This isn't because I'm particularly fearless or have that sense of immortality that people are always keen to ascribe to the young but because I hold a deep and unshakable belief in both logic and statistics. Mine is a one use only, disposable body in a life with a mortality rate of one hundred percent and given those odds, I'm more than willing to take that chance that this mole isn't cancer and it wont be my picture gracing the cover of the Sun after just one tab of E.

And if for some peculiar reason this is not the way everybody feels but merely something I am afflicted with then it goes without saying that this flaw in thinking is as charming as the rest.