Do you know your fabophile from your plangonophile?

On a recent episode of the French television show Quotidien, the host Yann Barthès presented a linguistic challenge that left his panel of commentators in a state of amused confusion.

The ‘Word of the Week’ was plangonophile. As the cameras panned across the faces of the guests, it was clear that no one had the slightest clue what it meant. 

Was it a rare medical condition? A niche political ideology? 

In fact, a plangonophile is a person who collects antique dolls. 

French has many wonderful words for niche collectors, mostly derived from Greek or Latin. Some of them are shared with English but many of them are either little used in English or relate to specifically French subjects.

You won’t often need to understand them, and you are unlikely to drop them into conversation, but they are still worth knowing.

What is a fabophile?

One of my favourites is fabophile. The tradition in France around Epiphany in early January is to share a galette des rois (king cake) with friends, family or members of an association. Hidden inside each cake is a fève. 

Traditionally this was a bean, but now it is a tiny novelty porcelain figurine. Thousands of different models are produced every year.

A fabophile is a collector of these little items of no intrinsic worth. Some people take their collecting very seriously and spend their lives tracking down the rarest examples.

France, as you will have noticed, is a country obsessed with cheese and wine, which leads to two other crazes.

A tyrosémiophile collects cheese labels, specifically those found on boxes of Camembert.

Alcohol-adjacent enthusiasm

A student and collector of wine labels, meanwhile, is known as an œnosémiophile. 

Champagne and sparkling wines have their own niche hobbyists. Collectors of Champagne caps and/or muselets, the wire cages that hold the cork, are called placomusophiles.

Beer-drinkers also have their collections. Tegestophilia (tegestology in English) is the activity of collecting beer mats and objects related to beer (glasses, stoneware mugs, bottles, advertisements, labels, etc.)

The sweeter things in life also yield their own vocabulary but you need to be aware of the difference between the glycophile who collects sugar sachets (served with a coffee in bars and bistros) and the périglycophile who collects the same items but only when they are empty.

And many more

There seems to be no end to collectibles. Peridromophiles find beauty in old transport tickets from trains, buses, and the Métro – scraps of paper that the rest of us throw away without thought.

The vitolphile hunts for cigar bands, preserving the colourful lithographs that once wrapped the world’s finest tobacco.

An épinglephile is a person who collects pins, and a molubdotémophile is someone who collects pencil sharpeners – items, surely, that are destined to be redundant one day.

Lovers of games and toys also have their own nomenclature. Those who collect tiny dolls and figurines on a miniature scale are micropuphiles, while céphaloclastophiles are collectors of puzzles (from the Greek kephalos for head and klastos for broken – implying, I suppose, that the hobby or the hobbyist is a ‘head-breaker’.

We are all familiar with book-loving bibliophiles but the French language has its own branch of them. Bédéphiles are passionate fans of bandes dessinées (comic books), an art form taken very seriously, with its own dedicated shops.

Collecting may be an obsession but it is usually a harmless one and often understandable. I have frequently been struck by the beauty of a wine label or a particularly well-sculpted fève but never been tempted to become an œnosémiophile or a fabophile.

My penchant, I have to admit, is for amassing rusty old tools from the olden days. What does that make me? An instrumentoferruginophile? I will accept the label.