Interesting Diseases

In all my life, I've enjoyed poring through reference books. After a while, reference books about the purely factual began to pall. I began to look at more interesting reference books, like Michael Newton's The Encyclopaedia of Cryptozoology and Diana Wynne Jones's A Tough Guide to Fantasyland. However, Jeff Vandermeer's The Thackery T Lambshead Pocket Guide To Eccentric & Discredited Diseases, with contributions from a stellar cast of inventive and awfully creative people, was the zenith of the genre.

I find that I cannot do better. But I have some humble contributions, which I've discovered over my years as a teacher.

1. Markosis: the dulling of the senses that comes with too much immersion in grading procedures.
2. Rudella: the redness that descends when one's hand holds a red pen and the white paper is covered with diseased writing and you just have to write comments about it.
3. Orthoporosis: painfully obvious holes in a supposedly structured argumentative essay because there is no meat on the bones.
4. Appendocytosis: creating addenda to your main argument because you used up your word limit writing nonsense and have to squeeze in the real stuff somewhere.

Maybe I should stop here. Heh.