Had an email from "GG" who found us via Tim Blair, and had some nice things to say about humbugonline. But that's not important now (c.f. Leslie Nielsen in Spy Hard). The imporant thing is that GG offered me a gift: a word I have not heard before, but which will now become an essential part of my vocabulary. In the past, when I have said or done something inadvisable, I have claimed by way of mitigation that I have Tourette's Syndrome or that the Devil made me do it (respectively). Now I have one word which covers all such cases.
Cacoethes (OED) Noun - an urge to do something inadvisable.
Perfect! Thanks GG
The Skeptic's Field Guide by Theo Clark and Jef Clark is licensed under a Creative Commons Attribution-NonCommercial-ShareAlike 3.0 Unported License.