If a country were ever to attempt to invade Britain again, they should consider saving their firepower and invest in cats and clowns with excellent vocabularies. According to Hitwise, after a fear of flying, folks in the UK search about these fears more often than any others.
People in the US also seem to fear flying the most (if you can base your conclusion on search activities), but are more likely to fear snakes, bugs, mice, and bats than cats. The more timid class of Americans also aren’t fond of heights, intimacy, and rejection. So if you really want to mess with someone who has a crush on you, dress as a clown and tell them you’ll never go out with them in a million years. They’ll have nightmares for weeks.
Robin Goad, pulling from Hitwise general manager Bill Tancer’s new book about search behavior, called Click, provides the top 10 fear-related searches in the UK, as of last week:
1. fear of flying (2.27% of all ‘fear of’ searches)
2. fear of cats (1.72%)
3. irrational fear of cats (1.34%)
4. fear of clowns (1.10%)
5. fear of long words (1.01%)
6. fear of heights (0.86%)
7. fear of the dark (0.62%)
8. fear of death (0.61%)
9. fear of spiders (0.43%)
10. fear of crime (0.36%)
I can see it now: Mr. Tinkles, reiterating to the world Evil does not wear a bonnet, sends a battalion of fools in clown face and floppy shoes to storm the beaches in the dark of night, their pockets full of spiders, their giant pants stuffed with the ominous purring of those weird hairless feline varieties, their shirts reading Pneumonoultramicroscopicsilicovolcanoconiosis!
Oh the horror.
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