synonyms - Is there an established suffix like -phobia that expresses dislike but not fear?
These days there are a host of words constructed with -phobia that express dislike towards a class of people or things. As far as I understand, in common parlance, -phobia technically encompasses any dislike, whether fearful or not. However, in spite of this it has acquired certain connotations:
- Clinical phobias have captured the lay peoples' imagination, and armchair psychiatrists have grown fond of over-diagnosing "phobias" on trivial grounds (eg. one who prefers taking the bus becomes "car-phobic", someone who orders a veggie burger is "meat-phobic", someone who finds cell phones impractical is "technophobic" and so on), whether such phobias are even recognized by the mental health community or not.
- Not all dislike is grounded in fear. For instance, one may dislike wearing cumbersome clothes not because he is terrified of becoming enveloped in them, but simply because they are not very comfortable.
- An occasional rhetorical tactic is to attack an opponent's dislike of a thing by suggesting this dislike is grounded in irrational fear instead of arising from logical conclusion. A person on the receiving end of this, by the mere act of using the word, is implicitly submitting to this attack, making even sound arguments for the alleged "phobia" sound self-defeating.
Because of this, I feel like there is a gap in vocabulary in certain cases when one wishes to describe "mere dislike" of a thing without necessarily fear of that thing.
Is there a suffix that can, in analogy to -phobia, be used to express such "mere dislike", but unlike -phobia, not carrying any connotation of fear?
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