All you're highlighting (and this is for Greg and Joe too) is that the standards of the printed word are in a race to the lowest and stupidest common denominator. That doesn't mean we should celebrate it.

Philias are the mirror image of phobias. Any phobia can be reversed and made into a philia. So if you have arachnophobia, there's likely an arachnophile out there. Claustrophobia? There's a claustrophile, as odd as that might seem. Are you a hexakosioihexekontahexaphobe? That Satanist down the block might be a hexakosioihexekontahexaphile. You'd better hope the katechon is in place or learn to love the Beast.

And the simple fact is that these words already exist. Sciophilia, Scotophilia, eclipsophilia.

I'm going to leave you with two points:

1. Benedetto Varchi, the famous Renaissance thinker, identified 4 strata of society: (a) i letterati, (b) i non idioti (che possono essere anche nobili e ricchi, ma non hanno studi di greco e di latino), (c) gli idioti, e (d) l'infima plebe e la feccia del popolazzo.

The problem is that in the US, it's now categories (c) and (d) that are doing most of the writing, even at previously esteemed journals of record. The Wall Street Journal may be a mix of mostly (b) with a few (a) and some (c), but that's the rare exception. No one should ever just acquiesce to that.

1. You meant to say "If I were a student of languages" because you should be using the subjunctive for a contrafactual statement.HUGS