misoneism (mis-oh-NEE-iz-uh m, mahy-soh-NEE-iz-uh m) - n., a fear, hatred, or intolerance of change or innovation.
Or specifically, of new things. The person with it is a misoneist. Some dictionaries present it as more fear, but the original sense and usage examples pretty clearly shade into the hatred or outright reactionaryism sense -- significantly, on Wikipedia, the word redirects to Luddite. If the form looks a little odd, that's because it's one of those rarities coined in Italian as misoneismo, by criminologist Cesare Lombroso from Greek roots (miso-, hatred + neo, new, + -ism(o)), before being borrowed in 1886.
His misoneism is so thorough, he still insists that "fax" is an abbreviation requiring a period.
---L.
