n.
A malaise where a person feels chronically short of time, and so tends to perform every task faster and to get flustered when encountering any kind of delay.
Example Citation:
The microwave oven is one of the modern objects that convey the most elemental feeling of power over the passing seconds. You watch those seconds, after all, as they tick past on the digital display. If you suffer from hurry sickness in its most advanced stages, you may find yourself punching eighty-eight seconds instead of ninety because it is faster to tap the same digit twice.
— James Gleick, Faster, Random House, 1999
Notes:
The term hurry sickness was coined back in the 1950s when the cardiologists Meyer Friedman and Ray Rosenman were researching personality types. By 1959 they had refined this to the now-classic Type A personality, a key element of which was a "harrying sense of time urgency."
Related Words:
Categories:
New words. 2013.