SNP’s word of the day: Hypergraphia

You should know it because: January is the time for new agendas (literal, figurative), and new journals, and new wall-sized Post-it notes like they have at ad agencies; it’s a time for scribbling down everything you want to happen. I think everyone has brief, glorious spurts of hypergraphia at the beginning of the new year. But for some people, the urge to write anything, everything, comes much more frequently. In 1998, American neurologist Alice Flaherty, suddenly overcome by the need to write down all she thought/saw/felt, diagnosed herself with what she termed "the midnight disease.” Since then it’s been oft discussed among writers, many of whom, faced with unreasonable weekly deadlines, would probably give anything to be so afflicted.