Fantod:
A fantod is a very bad mood or a feeling of extreme upset or anxiety. The word usually appears in the plural form, fantods, as in “I had the fantods all morning.” [Grammarist]
Noted in “A centennial look back at Edward Gorey’s macabre art and guarded life,” Mark Dery, WaPo:
Conservative critics who succumb to moral-panic attacks over such questions insist that Gorey’s sexuality was his own affair. Who gives a stuffed fantod whether the man was gay, asexual or, as he put it, “neither one thing nor the other particularly”? The answer, obviously, is: anyone who loves his work. Whatever Gorey was, his art is “culturally queer,” as the critic J. Bryan Lowder would say, to the tips of its ornately ringed fingers.
The ambitious reader might want to look for Gorey’s visual rendition of a fantod, thus to understand how one might stuff a feeling. We have several Gorey books lying about the house, and my Arts Editor is a fan.
