Oh. My. God. I’ve got a nasty case of misotrumpia!
Am I suffering from misophonia? For decades, I have bristled at particular sounds. These include car alarms going off, the wobbly noise from a half-tuned radio, the kzzhh-kzzhhkzzhh of someone else’s headphones on a train, reversing lorries beeping and going ‘this ve-hi-cle is re-ver- sing’, and the smug little ‘hur-hur-hurs’ that audiences at classical concerts emit when a performer sings or plays something supposedly ‘amusing’.
I also hate all the different sounds people make when blowing their noses, from the discreet and speculative — fnn-fnn-fnn — to the full- blown trumpet: PHWRPHRRRRPHHHHHARGH!
Nor can I keep calm when Pip, our West Highland terrier, gets it into his head to bark non- stop, even when there is nothing worth barking at.
For years, I have imagined that I bristle at these sounds because I am a peculiarly irritable sort of person. But new research from Newcastle University suggests otherwise.
Far from being a crotchety old grump who should be scorned by rightminded people, it turns out I have a condition, and must therefore be treated with immense sympathy and respect.
It can’t be long before everyone with an off-putting manner, from Basil Fawlty to Hannibal Lecter, is diagnosed with a special condition, but, for the moment, I am going to enjoy being a misophoniac, suffering from misophonia.
According to Dr Sukhbinder Kumar of the Institute of Neuroscience at Newcastle University, some people have a faulty ‘emotional control mechanism’ in their frontal lobe, and so their brain goes into overdrive on hearing certain ‘trigger’ sounds.
Common sounds that send us into meltdown include those of gum being chewed and pens being clicked.
‘For many people with misophonia, this will come as welcome news, as for the first time we have demonstrated a difference in brain structure and function in sufferers,’ says Dr Kumar. ‘This study demonstrates the critical brain changes as further evidence to convince a sceptical medical community that this is a genuine disorder.’
And so, overnight, I have gone from being an irritable old crosspatch with a short fuse to being a long-suffering victim with a genuine condition. Ever since hearing this, I have been striding around like the cock of the walk.
my sole regret is that my newly diagnosed condition only takes in my irritation with noises — noseblowing, vehicle-reversing and so forth. But what about the irritation I feel with so many other things? How long can it be before modern medicine diagnoses that as a condition, too?
For example, something goes ‘pop’ in my brain whenever I spot a moth flying around inside our house. In a few years’ time, will this be diagnosed as misomothia?
And what about my irritation with the pop group U2? Will that be called Bononia?
Some of my irritations clearly belong in a single category. For example, various modish expressions get on my nerves: ‘guilty pleasure’, for instance, or ‘110 per cent’ or ‘it’s not rocket science’.
Brexit has also thrown up many annoying words and phrases, one of which is ‘Brexit’ itself. And the next time I hear the Prime minister or one of her minions using the phrase ‘ the best possible deal’, I am going to ring the misophonia helpline.
I bridle, too, at TV programmes and newspaper articles about the greatest record, book, sportsman, etc ‘of all time’ or ‘in the history of the world’. Donald Trump can hardly speak a sentence without using this sort of daft hyperbole.
He pledges to be ‘the greatest jobs president God ever created’ who will negotiate ‘the best deals ever’, and so on. Presumably, there is a condition called misotrumpia just waiting to be discovered.
Listening to the Today programme on Radio 4 in the mornings, I find that the endless repetitions of the phrases ‘lessons need to be learned’ and ‘questions need to be asked’ act like double espressos, transforming me from sleepy to jittery in a matter of seconds.
SomETImES, as in the case of the phrase ‘oh my God!’, your irritation subsides after a year or two, as you begin to get used to it. At this point, perhaps sensing that it is losing its power to irritate, the phrase mutates, in this case into ‘ omG’ and thus recharges itself.
The same process may then enter a third phase. Having learned to live with ‘oh my God!’, and finally coming round to ‘ omG’, I now find myself freshly infuriated by its latest incarnation, ‘ oh. my. God.’, complete with those annoying full-stops.
my only hope is that Dr Kumar is soon to make an announcement about a new condition called misomgia, and thus permit all us sufferers a certain level of dignity.