Word
of the Week
by Kerry
Maxwell
Henmania
noun [U]
the condition of being a very enthusiastic supporter of the
British tennis player Tim Henman
Henmaniac
adjective,
noun [C]
‘It’s
a bit of a worry,’ she said. ‘There’s so much Henmania.
If he doesn’t win, the tournament gets devalued. He should
be considered a wonderful tennis player. Wimbledon is not
only about Tim Henman winning.’
(Virginia Wade, as
featured in The
Guardian, 30th June 2003)
Henmania is
a phenomenon that has been gripping the British public
annually in recent years as the British number one tennis
player, Tim Henman, attempts to win the famous championships
at the Wimbledon
tennis club.
Tim
Henman was born in 1974 in Oxfordshire, and at the age
of five had already decided he wanted to be a tennis player.
In 1992 he became National Junior Champion in both singles
and doubles and rose steadily through the rankings in
subsequent years, becoming the British number one in 1996.
The term Henmania was coined in the same year, when
Tim reached the Wimbledon quarter-finals, the first British
man to do so since Roger Taylor in 1973. It is sixty-seven
years since Britain had a men's singles champion; Fred Perry
was the last to win the Wimbledon title in 1936, before the
Second World War. The advent of a long-awaited champion and
intense media speculation has established the term Henmania
as an annual feature in the English language in the summers
of recent years, with headlines Henmania
runs wild in England..., Henmania
hits/strikes Wimbledon, a fresh
outbreak of Henmania... dominating the
media in June and July.
The term Henmaniac
quickly followed Henmania as a description of someone
'suffering' from the condition, used as a countable noun or
an adjective. We can also find evidence for the term anti-Henmania
and related adjective/noun anti-Henmaniac during the
last couple of years, as various letters to the media have
expressed contempt for the condition, equating it with
'loutish behaviour'.
Background
The noun mania is used both in the contexts of mental
illness and very strong enthusiasm for something, and in its
latter use often has rather disapproving overtones,
suggesting that something fills a person's mind so that they
have little time for anything else. It has established use
as a suffix, featuring in terms for mental conditions like kleptomania
(stealing) and pyromania (starting fires).
Another classic example of its use with people in the public
eye is the term Beatlemania, a phenomenon which swept
through Britain in the 1960s with the overwhelming
popularity of the Liverpool band.
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