An agony aunt is someone who answers questions about personal problems in a newspaper or magazine. Agony columns go back to at least 1860 – at which time they included messages for missing relatives – but the phrase itself seems to date back to about the 1930s. Neither phrase was greatly used until the 1970s and both are mainly restricted to Britain.
Oh that's a good word, I'll have to try and remember that... I think in Swedish we call them heart columns but I can't think of a word for the person answering the questions.
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