Do you suffer from Plyushkin's disorder? Statistics suggest that five per cent of us do, but my guess is it's more. Stepan Plyushkin is a character in Gogol's novel Dead Souls, who saves everything he finds. He is, in other words, a hoarder, who invests his emotions in the stuff other people throw away.
is from Anglo-Saxon hord, meaning treasure, and , meaning fence; hoarding is both an accumulation of clutter and a defence against its overflow. The etymology perfectly catches the condition: hoarders like
