September 17, 2013 • 35 mins
Word Aversion: The Story of Moist: Put your favorite pair of slacks on and join guest host Allison Loudermilk as she and Julie get to the bottom of word aversion. Find out why the word "moist" is so maligned and see if your favorite worst word made the list.
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Speaker 1 (00:03):
Welcome to Stuff to blow your mind from How Stuff
Works dot Com. Ladies and gentlemen, I am Julie Douglas,
and not with me today is Mr Lamb, who is
out of the country instead. One very brave soul joins
us today, the one the only Alison voice like Silk
(00:25):
Louder Milk. Thanks Julie. It's a pleasure to be here.
I haven't been in the studio and quite some time,
and I'm glad to be back to be discussing word
a version. I know we're gonna get into this in
a moment um. This is all your fault this episode today.
By the way, you want to explain how it came about,
and I do, I do um? Actually, do you think
(00:46):
you could take us back to one day in July?
It was like ten o'clock in the morning. There was
a fire drill here at How Stuff Works. We were
all congregated in the parking lot. I can't take it
from there, so yes, we were congregated in the parking
lot in Georgia. You know, it can be quite a
warm place in the summertime, and it can also have
a fair amount of moisture. So I do believe I
(01:08):
made the comment that it was feeling a little moist outside,
and Julie of course gave me this look because she
has that aversion to the word moist, which I do not.
And I am one of those people who enjoys tormenting
people with the word moist clearly because as I said,
it was ten o'clock in the morning, and I said
to you, it's not even noon. It's like drinking before noon.
(01:29):
It was, it was, And so we had this whole
conversation of like, oh, why do we have word a version?
What's it all about? And what's going on in your
brain when you have this word of version? What was
going on in your brain? Like what did you think
when I said that? I thought about the groin area
and I don't like to say groin either, that's that
oi oi. I thought about just just this unpleasant sort
(01:53):
of you know, mustiness. And this is all out of
the context of food. By the way, if if someone
is saying that something is you know, there's this cake
and it's moist and redlent um of you know, fruit
trees in may totally because you're reframing. Reframing, that's the key.
(02:14):
That's the keys We're going to find out here. So
it turns out though I'm not alone with this whole
moist thing. No, no, you're not, definitely not. So there
was a two thousand twelve Uffington Post entry that I
happened to come across and perhaps some of you saw
as well, and they were trying to come up with
synonyms for moist, and I actually I did like some
of them. My particular favorite was good crumb. Did she
(02:37):
catch that? I did see that? Like I kind of Again,
I'm gonna say it had a little bit of a
weird association, almost like hey, she gives good chrome, you know.
And this was in the context of food writing, right,
Like they were like, hey, as food writers, we have
to write about moist all the time. What words can
we put in there? So good chrome was one of them. Sure, spongy,
which I think is fairly descriptive, and a plastic cake
(02:59):
I would I would of spongey in the in the
realm of cake. And also hydrated, hydrated not dry a
little scientific yeah, yeah, hydrated is good, um, because it
was like, yeah, that's a hydrated piece of cake. I
just ate. And then not dry was another one. But
then I thought, you know what these are all sort
of paltry. I don't know that there actually would be
a stand in for moist when it comes to culinary writing. Yeah,
(03:20):
I think moist works well, and thus it's prevalence to
describe cake of all sorts. Nonetheless, moist just continues to
rise as this word that is much maligned. And I
wanted to point out that The New York Or had
a blog post called words came in Marked for Death.
And this was a Twitter game show that they started
(03:40):
called Questioning Lee and when the first installments was, hey,
if you were going to remove a word from the
English language, which one would it be? And again moist
got marked for death. Yeah. I also heard that slacks
came in pretty high on that list. Slacks, yes, I
might have nominated dungarees myself. Oh, dungarees. I think that's
kind of quaint, though I do. I think it's kind
(04:02):
of quaint, but it's also for me. Slacks and dungarees,
I kind of they're interchangeable. I saw trousers on one
list as well. I like trousers. Trouser has an elegant
connotation for me. How yeah, the same thing, And I
think that's what it all boils down to, is that
for me, that seems kind of like a fancy word
for pants. And everybody has their own, you know, idiosyncrasies
when it comes to these likes and dislikes of words.
(04:22):
And I was thinking about this too. It even probably
comes up in your profession. So if you're a teacher,
probably one of the most maligned words for you is
the word like. Oh sure, absolutely. Did you read the
Vanity Fair post in which Christopher Hitchins railed against the
usage of like as a placeholder and just it's craziness
in the English language. I mean I even hear it
(04:43):
out of my my daughter. Yeah. So it's all well
and good that we have these grammatical pet peeves where
it's like your regardless, where it's such as like, which
we already discussed, but we're really talking about words that
you have a serious distaste for. And the folks at
the Language Log, which is an excellent blog run by
a bunch of linguists, um and in particular, there's a
(05:03):
gentleman by the name of Mark Liberman who has written
and commented and aggregated posts on the subject at length,
and he kind of has taken on the task of
defining word a version and it's really this physiological response.
I mean, doesn't make your skin crawl? Yeah it does,
And I think that's the mystery of it, Like how
could a word elicit a physical response and how could
(05:26):
you absorb that into your body like that? And that's
what's so fascinating. Yeah, so we really have to dig
into the juicy, and perhaps already in territory of associations,
we will. So you want to give that a start,
miss Julie. Well, before we dive into Freud and the unconscious,
maybe we should play a bit of this clip from
(05:46):
Monty Python that you sent me. That is wonderful and
oh oh that could be a word, that could be
a trigger word. We are going to be working in
these trigger words and awesome. People hate it, they did,
but now it's so prevalent that people have begun to
adopt it as like, fine, this is a low level
world version today. Awesome. Awesome, Um, it's I think it's
in the realm of like you know, in terms of
(06:08):
pet Peeves. But this Monty Python clip in which there's
a kind of Downton Abbey like congregation of family in
a drawing room commenting on their pastoral, aristocratic life. Uh,
they begin to talk about certain words and recast and
and they talk about lovely woody words and dreadful tinny words. Tinny.
(06:32):
So let's have a listen there, gone, what's going? Yeah?
I think I think just like a word. It gives
me confidence. It's got a woody quality about it. School
much better than newspaper or little been peltly dreadful newspaper,
(06:59):
little been dreadful, titious worry. Al Right. So I love
that clip because it does kind of capture this whole
thing that we all have of words. And it goes
on and on, it gets even more ridiculous and great.
(07:20):
And they even bring up the word sausage. That's a
nice woody word. Yes, yes they do. You know what
it made me think of, Julie. It made me think,
if people have these word of versions and they're listening
to them with different accents, doesn't cause the same response.
I mean, would it be okay for you to hear
somebody say moist with an English accent as opposed to
just a flat out American English Southern accent. No? I
(07:46):
still yeah, even I think it might even be worse
if it is pronounced in a British accent. Okay, So
accents have no impact on this word of version for you.
And of course it's anecdotally anecdotal. And as will just
disc this word of version is not well studied. It
probably should because it would be fascinating to know if,
like a thousand years ago, if there are certain words
(08:06):
that you know, got on people's nerves and wine and
how contextual cultural that was. Research's our battering around some ideas,
and we'll get to that in a little bit. Yeah,
but first we gotta go into Freud and all things
that are sort of grizzly and awful. You have to
turn to Grandpa Freud here um. And when we talk
about Freud and unconscious, we're talking about the division of
(08:28):
the mind and psychoanalytic theory containing elements of psychic makeup.
We're talking about memories, repressed desires um, things that are
not consciously perceived by us or controlled, but they do
affect our conscious thoughts and how we behave in the world.
And so Freud, through all of the therapy that he
was doing with his patients, was trying to tease these
(08:50):
hidden mental processes from his patients through their dreams or
even word associations. And that's where it gets really interesting
when you start to look at language and words. And
I was even thinking about this in terms of embodied cognition,
those studies that talk about how if you have a
cup of warm coffee as opposed to a couple of
(09:11):
iced tea. When you have that warm coffee in your hand,
you're going to think more warm thoughts about the person
that you're talking to as opposed if you had that
iced coffee. Okay, So here's an example for you. Say
somebody were to serve you a slice of cake, and
on that plate that the cake was served on, there
was the word moist written on that plate indelibly. Fine,
(09:32):
really fine, it's the cake and then I know this
is not gonna be a dry cake, and I'm all
for it. But even if it was written on the plate,
that would not know, Okay, as long as there weren't
any strange, like, you know, depictions of groin areas accompanying
it depicted on the plate. I don't think they have
those kinds of there's not some sort of Greek you'ren
(09:55):
somewhere with a piece of cake and groinage. But but ye,
they have done studies like that in which people who
are freaked out by rats they wrote the word rat
on a plate and then they put a piece of
food on it whatever they were giving the poor test subjects,
and the people did have an issue with eating the
food on the plate that had rat written on it.
(10:16):
So that was kind of interesting. So I was just
wondering if that might hold truth for you as well. Well.
If it said rat, I have to say, then I
would probably not be as keen to eat that piece
of cake. Yeah. And and this has come up before
in the podcast before too, like if you have a
chocolate cake and you write cloeaca on the top and
pretty cursive frosting, is someone going to eat it when
they know what a cloeaca is? I think maybe if
(10:37):
it were purple frosting, all right, So for you, purple
cloeaca fine. But I wanted to point out that David
Eagleman talks about this this suggestibility a lot in some
of his work. In fact, it's in his book Incognito,
and this question of free will is being part and
parcel of the conscious mind hanging out at the sidelines
(10:58):
while the unconscious, and he says, kind of does all
the heavy lifting for us, and ultimately it sort of
delivers that burp of consciousness that we perceive, which I
think is really interesting because he says, you know, with
some things that we have those aha moments, that those
moments could have been in the works for weeks, months,
or even years, and that all this stuff is going
(11:21):
on under the cover of unconscious and so these word
of versions are manifestations of what you know, we find
delightful or disgusting in our lives, and so it would
stand to reason that words which also embody symbols would
come to represent ideas unconsciously for us. And then I
started to think about Young, who branched off from Freud,
(11:43):
and he had the whole collective unconscious thing going on, right,
So he's saying, yes, there's this deal about the unconscious
and all this hidden meaning, but collectively we all sort
of signed into this or signed onto this um system
of symbols. And so then I thought, well, that's really
interesting because that's perhaps how words like moist rise to
(12:03):
the top of our consciousness from the unconscious or the
collective unconsciousness, right, And our podcast isn't going to do
anything to help it. Now we're gonna continue to heat
up the flames under under moisture. There, that's an interesting analogy. Yeah,
(12:24):
now now I'm thinking about sweating buttocks. Sorry about that. So, Julie,
what do you think about bilingual and multilingual folks. Do
you think they have such word a versions? Well, I
know for a fact that they do have an emotional distance.
And I have talked about this before, but there's a
study in which participants were asked to assess a financial risk.
And now we already know that when it comes to
(12:46):
finances and trying to figure out what's a good choice
and a bad choice, that we're really messy thinkers about this.
And um, what they did, these participants they were asked
to think about this risk not in their mother tongue,
but in a second language that they were fluent him.
And the study is called the foreign language effect. Thinking
in a foreign tongue reduces decision biases, which I think
(13:07):
just gave away the results. Yeah, and the it was
a series of experiments more than three people from the
US and Korea. And what they found is that people
have two different modes of thoughts when they are trying
to process information and emotions, and one is really systematic
and analytical and cognitive intensive, and the other is fast,
(13:29):
unconscious and emotionally charged. And so what they found is
that when people were processing these risks in a second language,
they were not weighted with the emotion of the experience
of those words that might color their perception and the decisions.
So they made far more rational choices because they weren't
freighted with all of this uh emotion of language, and
(13:52):
it gave them that distance that they needed. And we
do tend to linger over negative emotions. And I think
that this is related to a word a version, and
that you think about these words really making you mad
or instilling some sort of feeling in you that is
not pleasant, and your brain kind of pauses longer over
the negativity. It's true because it turns out that we humans,
(14:16):
we remember far more negative words than positive ones. Yeah.
There's a study about emotion where it's correct. Yeah. Is
conducted by Dr Robert W. Schroff, He's the associate professor
of a POD Linguistics Penn State, and Julia Sanchez, a
graduate student psychology at the Chicago School of Psychology UM
and she they asked groups of people in Mexico City
(14:38):
in Chicago. This is important because they wanted to see
if there were any cultural differences in two age groups
twenty years old in sixty five years old to just
you know, list as many emotions as they could just
off the top of their head, and then those emotions
were categorized as negative, positive, or neutral. And it turns
out that people, um really did know many more of
(15:01):
these negative words and positive. We're talking about a proportion
of words that it's fifty percent negative, positive and neutral. Now,
in terms of differences between the age groups, it was
found that older folks had more of a diversity of words,
which makes sense because they have more life experience and
perhaps have dabbled in more word choices. But in terms
(15:25):
of proportion of negativity, it didn't matter what age you are.
You were still going to use or think of more
negative words. You know, depend no matter what your age was,
And it didn't matter if you were from Mexico or
excuse me, Mexico City or Chicago, you still again had
the memory available to you that was associated with negative words.
(15:48):
So I wonder if that's why we focus more on
word a version whether than word attraction. Do you have
attraction towards oh, I do, I do. I'm winking out
one of them, are it now? You know? It came
up and I was reading this over it was a
lot of people love the French word for grapefruit. Do
(16:09):
you happen to know it? I don't. What is it
forgive me? French speakers? Pump the moose? It's quite nice.
I think it sounds excellent, especially as compared with grapefruit. Well, yeah,
grapefruit is kind of heavy with the g right, and
we'll talk about that. It's one of those plosive words
and it does have impact, but it's not impactful. Just
for the record, impactful. I knew, I see, I knew,
(16:32):
I knew that would be on your list there. I
also hate impact as a verb, but that's a holy different,
that's a whole other ball. And you're an editor, so
by law, I think that you kind of have to.
So you would think that I would have a lot.
And I mean, you work with words all the time
as well, and I really don't have too many word
of versions. But again, I'm not quite ready to speak
to that. No, no, no, maybe maybe I'll save that
(16:54):
for the end. You mean, you're like centerpiece of word aversion.
The one word that gets you. So one word, all right,
we'll get to that. I think we all are going
to have to build up to this one. Yeah yeah. Um.
Let's talk about lists of aversion words and attraction words here.
A Mississippi State University survey found that among the student
population who submitted their least favorite words, these were the
(17:17):
ones that that rose to the top. And this is
in order of their level of hatred. Vomit, moist, puke,
phlagm in my nose right now, as you guys can
hear slaughter, snot ugly, damp, and mucus and then a
damp damp really yeah huh, I like damp, and I
like dank um oh, dank thank is a nice descriptor, right.
(17:40):
A two thousand and eleven follow up survey found moist
pulling into the number one slot, though, So it's really
a cultural phenomena, and that's what I'm thinking. I'm thinking
that this is a zeitguys moment for moist in the world,
and it would be very interesting to see if it
takes a turn, because, as we know, language is ever
evolving and and and takes on new meaning depending on
the sort of experiences that we have with it culturally.
(18:03):
So I have to share with you this product that
I found. I can't hold back anyone. So when I
was researching for the podcast, I came across a line
of skin care products and it was called Moist Diane.
And sometimes there is a comma inserted between moist and
Diane as if the more as if we were addressing
(18:25):
Diane directly. Sometimes the comma was taken out. So I
found this all very curious. Um it seemed to be
a line of beauty products from Japan, So I think
obviously that can cause some problems just as far as
naming products and then extending those product names to other languages,
and you know, what are the connotations here? That's really
(18:46):
tricky territory. Yeah, and we'll talk more about you know
how corporations use language to manipulate in a moment. But
you're right, there's like if you don't have the correct like, oh,
this is not a word that you want to necessarily
use with common then put someone's name that X to it,
then you just don't know that moist Diana right now
is making my tear ducks in my eye really active.
(19:07):
But alright, so those are some aversion words. Let's splip
over to the beautiful, that the attractive words. I don't
know why I'm talking like that. Let's luxuriate in these words.
According to Ben Zimmer, writing for Visual Source, the words
selected the most oftenest favorite is love. Oh really yeah? Okay,
(19:30):
but I thought, okay, that's that's sweet. We should have
more words for love. I agree, you know it should
be you know how there's the whole thing of like
the you know, seventy words for snow and love should
be so important that you should have one million, right
or you know, we should probably ask our our listeners
to let us know some of the words that they
use instead of love for love? Is there a standing?
(19:53):
Is there not? Because I would be really interested enough
from you guys. Um. But this word is then followed
by the really it feel good term serendipity. Serendipity does
come up a lot, yeah, grace and peace and other
favorites are polk ertude, although I have seen polkartudinus on
the other list and word of versions you collected the Guardian,
(20:14):
I think they railed against polkertude and polkartudinous. Yeah. I
didn't really get um, other than it sounds like a
mismatch from what it means, which is beautiful, schaden freud, perspicacious.
I like that one. Mellifluous, oh yeah, and discombobulate. Discombobulates
a big one. It has so many satisfying syllables in there,
it does. That's one that you can really kind of
(20:35):
garbble around in your mouth like a bunch of marbles.
And that's what some people like, I mean, and and
that's also what some people hate, right, So that's the sense.
It's not just the association, it's the way it sounds,
the way it feels to pronounce the word. We'll see.
That's the interesting part of it, right, because um, it's
not Yeah, it's like a physical response. And that's the
whole embodied cognition that if you do something physically, then
(20:58):
your your brain will fall low and have those sort
of patterns. So if you have discombobulated in your mouth,
then you feel sort of like you're luxuriating in language.
That's nice, RELI, that's very nice, thank you. So for
some reason, the oi diphthong has gotten a bit of
a bad rap well, because it shows up in moist
(21:20):
and groin goiter gitter. I love giter I just love it.
Should we discuss what an oral dipthong is? Go ahead,
all right, Well we're talking about our gliding vowels in
a one syllable word, so it uh diplong actually translate
literally to two voices or two sounds, so it's not
just like your straightforward um clip right, it's cow ow cow.
(21:46):
That's nice. Yeah, you can't see eventually it's making a
lovely face that she pronounces. And it's too bad we
don't have a video accompaniment of this. We'll see when.
When this brings up this this idea too of um,
you know, these dipthongs and how words feel on our mouth.
It brings up this idea of synthsia, right, and synath
asia is a perceptual condition in which information between the
(22:09):
senses is blended. So if I see a word, I
might see a color as well, or here are sound
podcast about this before we have we've definitely touched on
this before. So this this becomes the question is is
the word a version or word attractions simply something that
is being processed in our brains so that the other
senses are are not just tacking on connotations to it,
(22:31):
but actually trying to take that symbol and reinterpret it
in different modes. Right, And so this is a hypothesis
that David Eagleman and his lab are testing out over
at Baylor. And what they're doing, I mean they basically
if you guys are interested in taking the survey, and
I'm sure they would appreciate it. I took it the
other day interparation for this podcast, and it takes about
(22:53):
fifteen minutes. Although it didn't for me because I don't
think that I have this condition unfortunate, uh so it
didn't really lead me any farther. But this is a
hypothesis that they have out there because nobody really knows
why do we why do we have these word of versions. Yeah,
and I kind of got a couple of clues from
taking in the test. I have to say, oh, you
(23:13):
did take it, Yeah, I did. And some of the
questions were, um, like, you know, did you have migraines
as a child, did you have any hearing loss as
a child, Um, did you have here ear infections? Someone?
And so forth. So I think they're trying to see
whether or not there have been some things crossed in
the brain initially and then um, of course they talk about,
(23:35):
you know, some other continus like a d D and
I don't know if they talk specifically about schizophrenia, but
they're trying to get to the bottom of this, like
what is driving this senestia, this idea that you're looking
at a word and feeling something. In fact, one of
the questions and the questionnaire was do certain words trigger
a taste in your mouth? Example? Does the name Derek
(23:56):
taste like ear wax? I saw that. I love that.
It's so great, Poor Derek. I know all the Derek's
out there, sorry about that. I don't. For me, I
don't the taste of ear waxes not inhabit My mouth
tasted ear wax, definitely, scabs fried chicken, but I don't
have you ever tasted your wax? No, but how do
(24:18):
you just throw off scabs and fried chicken? Like, yeah,
scabs and fried chicken. I know that. Well, Yeah, because
you know, I conducted an experiment when I was younger. Okay,
no longer, this is no longer. I'm just saying, yeah,
I think i'd be really interesting to be a lexical
acoustatory type of sinnis feat. That's right, That's that's the category, right,
(24:39):
it is. Indeed. Yeah, I think I had a bit
of a visual sinnis feet, but I was low on it,
you know, And I think it was more like, hey,
you like to dream up things in your head? There.
All right, let's take a quick break, and when we
get back, we're going to talk about the corporate scrabble
strategy of trying to manipulate language and words to make us,
(25:01):
uh do their bidding. All right, we're back. Did you
do you catch any of the flagged words from either
of the lists in there? Yeah, gossamer, I'm fetching, fetching.
Also very nice, belieguer. What do you think about the leaguer? Okay,
(25:22):
that wasn't in the advertisement, but I like the leaguered.
I like the leaguered better than be leaguer. You're feeling
beliaguered by all the podcast research you had to do.
It's yeah, it's more impactful. But squab squab was on
the list squib squab, scipt squab. So squab is a
kind of bird, right, and uh, for years I've been
(25:43):
saying squibt squab. I didn't realize that that was a
word that had risen to the top of maligned words. Also, cornucopia. Yes,
And in fact, we we have a little thing we're
going to do at the end here, We're going to
construct our own sentences of of words. Oh okay, I
copia shows up in my sentence, by the way. And
I invite listeners to do this as well. Yes, do
(26:05):
do send us your crazy word of vision sentences. Yeah,
because the the idea is, let's see if we can
really make people um sort of wins here. Um all right,
so manipulating language. We've got corporations, h masters at this,
masters at this. And you brought this up the other day.
You were like, you know what, the letters X and Y,
they're used in a lot of products. Excuse me, X
(26:27):
and Z you want to go for those big scrabble
jackpot letters to make them stand out other I don't
know that it does anymore. I just due to the
preponderance of X and z um in particularly pharmaceutical names. Yeah,
and that was the idea right at first, that they
were being used so that they would stand out in
the market. Yeah. I mean think xan X, think Zertech, Zoloft.
(26:50):
What other ones you got, Julie, Um, I don't know
a lot. Zufia are you making that up zinias zium. Yeah,
so it seems like linguists and working in tandem with
corporations could wait into a whole world of trouble. So
(27:10):
you do want to consult the linguists when you're figuring
out what you're gonna name your venerable product. And so
m A lot of corporate corporations have gone with the
X and Z strategy. But I mean there's also just
the word itself. Okay. For example, do you remember when
that tablet called the iPad came out? What is it?
Have you heard of this thing called the yea? Yeah,
(27:32):
that was the thing. Yeah, yeah, that thing where you
do the thing and the thing and then your kid
just takes control of it. Yeah, I know that. Yeah.
So I remember when iPad first came out. I was thinking, huh,
that's really odd that they would name something after you know,
female product, thinking of pads. I was thinking sanitary. I
was thinking of sanitary pads, thank you. And then eventually
(27:56):
the iPad did its iPad thing and took over the
world and is running for you know, world dictatorship, and uh,
the iPad kind of left my brain with its association.
So I think that there's very much a case, again
anecdotally in terms of words ever evolving and in terms
of our own personal associations with those words changing, because
(28:18):
tell you, the truth is kind of flipped now. So
hygiene products I almost think of as sort of sleek,
like an iPad. It's weird the way that works. I thought,
I saw you on on the train the other day, um,
just flipping out a pad and then just kind of
typing on it and looking around and looking like very
self satisfied there. Yeah, I wasn't sure that was a pad,
(28:39):
but now I know, Um, all right, so that that's
this idea, right, that you can reframe and you can
retrain your brain. Um. But I did want to point
out before we talk a little bit more about that,
is that advertisers and linguists who are consulting with them
can also give advertisers a jump by using a little
(29:00):
ation and rhyme where love it. Yeah, I mean we're
talking about you know, when we talk about a literation
and rhyme, nutter butter YouTube on amanopeas right, like Twitter. Absolutely,
these are things that stick in the brain and close
of consonants. These are really important in advertising too, because
these plosive you can already hear plose of consonants cause
(29:21):
the airflow to stop during pronunciation because there's an inclusion
in the mouth, So we're talking about the glottis in
the back of the throat or the tongue, and what
happens is that the pressure of that air builds up
against whatever it is that's including the airway, and then
when it's releases that the air is allowed to pass,
you get a more forceful sound. So okay, so if
(29:45):
it's a more forceful sound, is it a more memorable sound? Well, yeah,
because you're giving a little bit more emphasis to it.
So if I'm you know, close up B or hard
see like or A D A G K A p
R T, there's it's just more powerful powerful, right, No, definitely,
which leads this idea that some words, when they are said,
(30:09):
are going to have you want to say impactful again,
I was going to say more of an emotional impact.
I really was. I wasn't going to do that to
your third time. You're you're kind enough to come on
and hang out with me. So but this kind of
gets this idea of there might be the word that
that you really really dislike, that that could be one
(30:29):
of the reasons why you dislike it besides the cultural
connotation that it has, And I don't know if you're
ready to talk about it or if you want to,
So it's worth pointing out that there's no surprise then
why moist kind of reigns supreme because it has the
connotation for a lot of people, a lot of I
think women in particular, I would be curious to hear
from men if they have the moist word a version. Um.
(30:54):
So it has the connotation like we talked about, and
it also has that that always sound that we don't
really like to say apparently, although I still maintain that
goiter is awesome. It goiter is awesome. But when when
we talk about closives, and I'm not going to make
you say your word, by the way, because it's not
a good word, and I see that you don't want
(31:15):
to say this word, So I'm going to say another
word that is a forceful word, and I'm going to
say it in the context of that movie Dick Tracy.
There are some words that you can just lob around
and they are going to have more of an impact.
I can do this, Julie, I don't have to. This
is an awful word. My my word a version is
to the word that the C word um for women.
(31:38):
It's hard for me to even say. It's hard for
me to talk about. This is the only connection I
have to word a version. I can type all day,
I can type all sorts of things, I can type
weird stuff, I can type impactful over and over and
not have any reaction. But the C word, for me,
it's just it's just one of those words. It's it's
the only word for me that that I have that
reaction to. Yeah, and again this is you've got so
(31:59):
many mean Actually, if you went through the list, you
could just take off everything right. You could say it's
got the closeft consonance two of them, right, and um,
it's got the cultural associations and it's just mean spirited.
So when you lab it at someone, it's got a
lot more force than another word. It's worth noting, though,
that people have attempted to reclaim the word, as I
(32:25):
don't know whether they would be successful. I think there
are a lot of people like me out there or
have this crazy relationship and just a really averse to it.
But I admire the attempt to reclaim Yeah, I do too,
and I understand you that in other parts of the
world that it's not a big deal. In Australia, yeah,
I think it's in Australia, maybe in Britain to you guys,
(32:45):
let me know out there, but it's sort of thrown
around is in a more playful sense. But I think
for for you and obviously women in the United States,
it's one of those things. It's like taken out at
a K forty seven, Julie, Yes, Aliston, have you run
out of creamy? Oh, moist, the putrid, oh, crepuscular? Word
(33:07):
diverse topics for today? I think we have we have.
The only thing I wanted to mention is that not
only you know, is it gonna differ from language the
language what words are are word diversive, word attractive, but
also tonal aspects of it. You didn't get to the
tonal language. Yeah, so if you're speaking in Vietnamese, one
word could mean five different things depending on the way
(33:29):
that you pronounce that word, which then brings up this
whole idea of the musicality of language and how it
affects emotion and how we process. But I think for
the time being, I think it's worth saying that it's
we can all agree that words have emotion, and then
our brains are processing it in a certain way and
everything is pretty much codified. So you take a word
like moist and you start to tease it apart, and
(33:52):
you see that it means a lot of different things
to a lot of different people, and then maybe nothing
to some people. It's pretty fascinating stuff. And gelogists I
would love more talking about the soil, but they're used
to it because they're dealing what they're dealing with soil.
They're dealing with moist soil, so they're dealing with that
bong all day. They probably are like, what's what's up
(34:12):
with moist? I love it. I'm also only going to
describe this. We're taking something valuable away from me when
you say that we should take moist away from the
English language. So do you have your sentence of word
a version or did you already laid on me? I
may have laid it on you with that putrid, crepuscular
business that we were just discussing. Okay, so here's what
I got, here's mine. When the slack wearing, squab loving
(34:36):
man thrust his pinky into his moist, naval and extracted
and impressive amount of crud. He was inspired to create
a new design for bandage, featuring a cornucopia of scaps
the color of fudge. Wells a Julie, well done, Thank you,
thank you. Sorry. If it kind of freaked everybody out
or anybody out, I think we should probably leave it there. Okay,
(34:59):
we'll do yeah, all right. Let us know you guys,
do you have word of versions? Do you have a
sentence of word of versions you'd like to share with us? Oh,
we'd love to hear them. We would really really love
to hear them. And you know, do you have any
thoughts on how we overlay words with intended or unintended
meaning based on our experiences in the world, And did
(35:20):
we leave anything out? Surely we did. Let us know
on Facebook, Twitter, or you can send us a handcrafted
email at blow the Mind at Discovery dot com. Allison,
thank you for counterbalancing my my flemmy tones today with
your dulcet ones and hanging out with us. Julia, is
a pleasure to be here. Oh dude. For more on
(35:45):
this and thousands of other topics, Is that how Stuff
Works dot Com
Welcome to Stuff to blow your mind from How Stuff
Works dot Com. Ladies and gentlemen, I am Julie Douglas,
and not with me today is Mr Lamb, who is
out of the country instead. One very brave soul joins
us today, the one the only Alison voice like Silk
(00:25):
Louder Milk. Thanks Julie. It's a pleasure to be here.
I haven't been in the studio and quite some time,
and I'm glad to be back to be discussing word
a version. I know we're gonna get into this in
a moment um. This is all your fault this episode today.
By the way, you want to explain how it came about,
and I do, I do um? Actually, do you think
(00:46):
you could take us back to one day in July?
It was like ten o'clock in the morning. There was
a fire drill here at How Stuff Works. We were
all congregated in the parking lot. I can't take it
from there, so yes, we were congregated in the parking
lot in Georgia. You know, it can be quite a
warm place in the summertime, and it can also have
a fair amount of moisture. So I do believe I
(01:08):
made the comment that it was feeling a little moist outside,
and Julie of course gave me this look because she
has that aversion to the word moist, which I do not.
And I am one of those people who enjoys tormenting
people with the word moist clearly because as I said,
it was ten o'clock in the morning, and I said
to you, it's not even noon. It's like drinking before noon.
(01:29):
It was, it was, And so we had this whole
conversation of like, oh, why do we have word a version?
What's it all about? And what's going on in your
brain when you have this word of version? What was
going on in your brain? Like what did you think
when I said that? I thought about the groin area
and I don't like to say groin either, that's that
oi oi. I thought about just just this unpleasant sort
(01:53):
of you know, mustiness. And this is all out of
the context of food. By the way, if if someone
is saying that something is you know, there's this cake
and it's moist and redlent um of you know, fruit
trees in may totally because you're reframing. Reframing, that's the key.
(02:14):
That's the keys We're going to find out here. So
it turns out though I'm not alone with this whole
moist thing. No, no, you're not, definitely not. So there
was a two thousand twelve Uffington Post entry that I
happened to come across and perhaps some of you saw
as well, and they were trying to come up with
synonyms for moist, and I actually I did like some
of them. My particular favorite was good crumb. Did she
(02:37):
catch that? I did see that? Like I kind of Again,
I'm gonna say it had a little bit of a
weird association, almost like hey, she gives good chrome, you know.
And this was in the context of food writing, right,
Like they were like, hey, as food writers, we have
to write about moist all the time. What words can
we put in there? So good chrome was one of them. Sure, spongy,
which I think is fairly descriptive, and a plastic cake
(02:59):
I would I would of spongey in the in the
realm of cake. And also hydrated, hydrated not dry a
little scientific yeah, yeah, hydrated is good, um, because it
was like, yeah, that's a hydrated piece of cake. I
just ate. And then not dry was another one. But
then I thought, you know what these are all sort
of paltry. I don't know that there actually would be
a stand in for moist when it comes to culinary writing. Yeah,
(03:20):
I think moist works well, and thus it's prevalence to
describe cake of all sorts. Nonetheless, moist just continues to
rise as this word that is much maligned. And I
wanted to point out that The New York Or had
a blog post called words came in Marked for Death.
And this was a Twitter game show that they started
(03:40):
called Questioning Lee and when the first installments was, hey,
if you were going to remove a word from the
English language, which one would it be? And again moist
got marked for death. Yeah. I also heard that slacks
came in pretty high on that list. Slacks, yes, I
might have nominated dungarees myself. Oh, dungarees. I think that's
kind of quaint, though I do. I think it's kind
(04:02):
of quaint, but it's also for me. Slacks and dungarees,
I kind of they're interchangeable. I saw trousers on one
list as well. I like trousers. Trouser has an elegant
connotation for me. How yeah, the same thing, And I
think that's what it all boils down to, is that
for me, that seems kind of like a fancy word
for pants. And everybody has their own, you know, idiosyncrasies
when it comes to these likes and dislikes of words.
(04:22):
And I was thinking about this too. It even probably
comes up in your profession. So if you're a teacher,
probably one of the most maligned words for you is
the word like. Oh sure, absolutely. Did you read the
Vanity Fair post in which Christopher Hitchins railed against the
usage of like as a placeholder and just it's craziness
in the English language. I mean I even hear it
(04:43):
out of my my daughter. Yeah. So it's all well
and good that we have these grammatical pet peeves where
it's like your regardless, where it's such as like, which
we already discussed, but we're really talking about words that
you have a serious distaste for. And the folks at
the Language Log, which is an excellent blog run by
a bunch of linguists, um and in particular, there's a
(05:03):
gentleman by the name of Mark Liberman who has written
and commented and aggregated posts on the subject at length,
and he kind of has taken on the task of
defining word a version and it's really this physiological response.
I mean, doesn't make your skin crawl? Yeah it does,
And I think that's the mystery of it, Like how
could a word elicit a physical response and how could
(05:26):
you absorb that into your body like that? And that's
what's so fascinating. Yeah, so we really have to dig
into the juicy, and perhaps already in territory of associations,
we will. So you want to give that a start,
miss Julie. Well, before we dive into Freud and the unconscious,
maybe we should play a bit of this clip from
(05:46):
Monty Python that you sent me. That is wonderful and
oh oh that could be a word, that could be
a trigger word. We are going to be working in
these trigger words and awesome. People hate it, they did,
but now it's so prevalent that people have begun to
adopt it as like, fine, this is a low level
world version today. Awesome. Awesome, Um, it's I think it's
in the realm of like you know, in terms of
(06:08):
pet Peeves. But this Monty Python clip in which there's
a kind of Downton Abbey like congregation of family in
a drawing room commenting on their pastoral, aristocratic life. Uh,
they begin to talk about certain words and recast and
and they talk about lovely woody words and dreadful tinny words. Tinny.
(06:32):
So let's have a listen there, gone, what's going? Yeah?
I think I think just like a word. It gives
me confidence. It's got a woody quality about it. School
much better than newspaper or little been peltly dreadful newspaper,
(06:59):
little been dreadful, titious worry. Al Right. So I love
that clip because it does kind of capture this whole
thing that we all have of words. And it goes
on and on, it gets even more ridiculous and great.
(07:20):
And they even bring up the word sausage. That's a
nice woody word. Yes, yes they do. You know what
it made me think of, Julie. It made me think,
if people have these word of versions and they're listening
to them with different accents, doesn't cause the same response.
I mean, would it be okay for you to hear
somebody say moist with an English accent as opposed to
just a flat out American English Southern accent. No? I
(07:46):
still yeah, even I think it might even be worse
if it is pronounced in a British accent. Okay, So
accents have no impact on this word of version for you.
And of course it's anecdotally anecdotal. And as will just
disc this word of version is not well studied. It
probably should because it would be fascinating to know if,
like a thousand years ago, if there are certain words
(08:06):
that you know, got on people's nerves and wine and
how contextual cultural that was. Research's our battering around some ideas,
and we'll get to that in a little bit. Yeah,
but first we gotta go into Freud and all things
that are sort of grizzly and awful. You have to
turn to Grandpa Freud here um. And when we talk
about Freud and unconscious, we're talking about the division of
(08:28):
the mind and psychoanalytic theory containing elements of psychic makeup.
We're talking about memories, repressed desires um, things that are
not consciously perceived by us or controlled, but they do
affect our conscious thoughts and how we behave in the world.
And so Freud, through all of the therapy that he
was doing with his patients, was trying to tease these
(08:50):
hidden mental processes from his patients through their dreams or
even word associations. And that's where it gets really interesting
when you start to look at language and words. And
I was even thinking about this in terms of embodied cognition,
those studies that talk about how if you have a
cup of warm coffee as opposed to a couple of
(09:11):
iced tea. When you have that warm coffee in your hand,
you're going to think more warm thoughts about the person
that you're talking to as opposed if you had that
iced coffee. Okay, So here's an example for you. Say
somebody were to serve you a slice of cake, and
on that plate that the cake was served on, there
was the word moist written on that plate indelibly. Fine,
(09:32):
really fine, it's the cake and then I know this
is not gonna be a dry cake, and I'm all
for it. But even if it was written on the plate,
that would not know, Okay, as long as there weren't
any strange, like, you know, depictions of groin areas accompanying
it depicted on the plate. I don't think they have
those kinds of there's not some sort of Greek you'ren
(09:55):
somewhere with a piece of cake and groinage. But but ye,
they have done studies like that in which people who
are freaked out by rats they wrote the word rat
on a plate and then they put a piece of
food on it whatever they were giving the poor test subjects,
and the people did have an issue with eating the
food on the plate that had rat written on it.
(10:16):
So that was kind of interesting. So I was just
wondering if that might hold truth for you as well. Well.
If it said rat, I have to say, then I
would probably not be as keen to eat that piece
of cake. Yeah. And and this has come up before
in the podcast before too, like if you have a
chocolate cake and you write cloeaca on the top and
pretty cursive frosting, is someone going to eat it when
they know what a cloeaca is? I think maybe if
(10:37):
it were purple frosting, all right, So for you, purple
cloeaca fine. But I wanted to point out that David
Eagleman talks about this this suggestibility a lot in some
of his work. In fact, it's in his book Incognito,
and this question of free will is being part and
parcel of the conscious mind hanging out at the sidelines
(10:58):
while the unconscious, and he says, kind of does all
the heavy lifting for us, and ultimately it sort of
delivers that burp of consciousness that we perceive, which I
think is really interesting because he says, you know, with
some things that we have those aha moments, that those
moments could have been in the works for weeks, months,
or even years, and that all this stuff is going
(11:21):
on under the cover of unconscious and so these word
of versions are manifestations of what you know, we find
delightful or disgusting in our lives, and so it would
stand to reason that words which also embody symbols would
come to represent ideas unconsciously for us. And then I
started to think about Young, who branched off from Freud,
(11:43):
and he had the whole collective unconscious thing going on, right,
So he's saying, yes, there's this deal about the unconscious
and all this hidden meaning, but collectively we all sort
of signed into this or signed onto this um system
of symbols. And so then I thought, well, that's really
interesting because that's perhaps how words like moist rise to
(12:03):
the top of our consciousness from the unconscious or the
collective unconsciousness, right, And our podcast isn't going to do
anything to help it. Now we're gonna continue to heat
up the flames under under moisture. There, that's an interesting analogy. Yeah,
(12:24):
now now I'm thinking about sweating buttocks. Sorry about that. So, Julie,
what do you think about bilingual and multilingual folks. Do
you think they have such word a versions? Well, I
know for a fact that they do have an emotional distance.
And I have talked about this before, but there's a
study in which participants were asked to assess a financial risk.
And now we already know that when it comes to
(12:46):
finances and trying to figure out what's a good choice
and a bad choice, that we're really messy thinkers about this.
And um, what they did, these participants they were asked
to think about this risk not in their mother tongue,
but in a second language that they were fluent him.
And the study is called the foreign language effect. Thinking
in a foreign tongue reduces decision biases, which I think
(13:07):
just gave away the results. Yeah, and the it was
a series of experiments more than three people from the
US and Korea. And what they found is that people
have two different modes of thoughts when they are trying
to process information and emotions, and one is really systematic
and analytical and cognitive intensive, and the other is fast,
(13:29):
unconscious and emotionally charged. And so what they found is
that when people were processing these risks in a second language,
they were not weighted with the emotion of the experience
of those words that might color their perception and the decisions.
So they made far more rational choices because they weren't
freighted with all of this uh emotion of language, and
(13:52):
it gave them that distance that they needed. And we
do tend to linger over negative emotions. And I think
that this is related to a word a version, and
that you think about these words really making you mad
or instilling some sort of feeling in you that is
not pleasant, and your brain kind of pauses longer over
the negativity. It's true because it turns out that we humans,
(14:16):
we remember far more negative words than positive ones. Yeah.
There's a study about emotion where it's correct. Yeah. Is
conducted by Dr Robert W. Schroff, He's the associate professor
of a POD Linguistics Penn State, and Julia Sanchez, a
graduate student psychology at the Chicago School of Psychology UM
and she they asked groups of people in Mexico City
(14:38):
in Chicago. This is important because they wanted to see
if there were any cultural differences in two age groups
twenty years old in sixty five years old to just
you know, list as many emotions as they could just
off the top of their head, and then those emotions
were categorized as negative, positive, or neutral. And it turns
out that people, um really did know many more of
(15:01):
these negative words and positive. We're talking about a proportion
of words that it's fifty percent negative, positive and neutral. Now,
in terms of differences between the age groups, it was
found that older folks had more of a diversity of words,
which makes sense because they have more life experience and
perhaps have dabbled in more word choices. But in terms
(15:25):
of proportion of negativity, it didn't matter what age you are.
You were still going to use or think of more
negative words. You know, depend no matter what your age was,
And it didn't matter if you were from Mexico or
excuse me, Mexico City or Chicago, you still again had
the memory available to you that was associated with negative words.
(15:48):
So I wonder if that's why we focus more on
word a version whether than word attraction. Do you have
attraction towards oh, I do, I do. I'm winking out
one of them, are it now? You know? It came
up and I was reading this over it was a
lot of people love the French word for grapefruit. Do
(16:09):
you happen to know it? I don't. What is it
forgive me? French speakers? Pump the moose? It's quite nice.
I think it sounds excellent, especially as compared with grapefruit. Well, yeah,
grapefruit is kind of heavy with the g right, and
we'll talk about that. It's one of those plosive words
and it does have impact, but it's not impactful. Just
for the record, impactful. I knew, I see, I knew,
(16:32):
I knew that would be on your list there. I
also hate impact as a verb, but that's a holy different,
that's a whole other ball. And you're an editor, so
by law, I think that you kind of have to.
So you would think that I would have a lot.
And I mean, you work with words all the time
as well, and I really don't have too many word
of versions. But again, I'm not quite ready to speak
to that. No, no, no, maybe maybe I'll save that
(16:54):
for the end. You mean, you're like centerpiece of word aversion.
The one word that gets you. So one word, all right,
we'll get to that. I think we all are going
to have to build up to this one. Yeah yeah. Um.
Let's talk about lists of aversion words and attraction words here.
A Mississippi State University survey found that among the student
population who submitted their least favorite words, these were the
(17:17):
ones that that rose to the top. And this is
in order of their level of hatred. Vomit, moist, puke,
phlagm in my nose right now, as you guys can
hear slaughter, snot ugly, damp, and mucus and then a
damp damp really yeah huh, I like damp, and I
like dank um oh, dank thank is a nice descriptor, right.
(17:40):
A two thousand and eleven follow up survey found moist
pulling into the number one slot, though, So it's really
a cultural phenomena, and that's what I'm thinking. I'm thinking
that this is a zeitguys moment for moist in the world,
and it would be very interesting to see if it
takes a turn, because, as we know, language is ever
evolving and and and takes on new meaning depending on
the sort of experiences that we have with it culturally.
(18:03):
So I have to share with you this product that
I found. I can't hold back anyone. So when I
was researching for the podcast, I came across a line
of skin care products and it was called Moist Diane.
And sometimes there is a comma inserted between moist and
Diane as if the more as if we were addressing
(18:25):
Diane directly. Sometimes the comma was taken out. So I
found this all very curious. Um it seemed to be
a line of beauty products from Japan, So I think
obviously that can cause some problems just as far as
naming products and then extending those product names to other languages,
and you know, what are the connotations here? That's really
(18:46):
tricky territory. Yeah, and we'll talk more about you know
how corporations use language to manipulate in a moment. But
you're right, there's like if you don't have the correct like, oh,
this is not a word that you want to necessarily
use with common then put someone's name that X to it,
then you just don't know that moist Diana right now
is making my tear ducks in my eye really active.
(19:07):
But alright, so those are some aversion words. Let's splip
over to the beautiful, that the attractive words. I don't
know why I'm talking like that. Let's luxuriate in these words.
According to Ben Zimmer, writing for Visual Source, the words
selected the most oftenest favorite is love. Oh really yeah? Okay,
(19:30):
but I thought, okay, that's that's sweet. We should have
more words for love. I agree, you know it should
be you know how there's the whole thing of like
the you know, seventy words for snow and love should
be so important that you should have one million, right
or you know, we should probably ask our our listeners
to let us know some of the words that they
use instead of love for love? Is there a standing?
(19:53):
Is there not? Because I would be really interested enough
from you guys. Um. But this word is then followed
by the really it feel good term serendipity. Serendipity does
come up a lot, yeah, grace and peace and other
favorites are polk ertude, although I have seen polkartudinus on
the other list and word of versions you collected the Guardian,
(20:14):
I think they railed against polkertude and polkartudinous. Yeah. I
didn't really get um, other than it sounds like a
mismatch from what it means, which is beautiful, schaden freud, perspicacious.
I like that one. Mellifluous, oh yeah, and discombobulate. Discombobulates
a big one. It has so many satisfying syllables in there,
it does. That's one that you can really kind of
(20:35):
garbble around in your mouth like a bunch of marbles.
And that's what some people like, I mean, and and
that's also what some people hate, right, So that's the sense.
It's not just the association, it's the way it sounds,
the way it feels to pronounce the word. We'll see.
That's the interesting part of it, right, because um, it's
not Yeah, it's like a physical response. And that's the
whole embodied cognition that if you do something physically, then
(20:58):
your your brain will fall low and have those sort
of patterns. So if you have discombobulated in your mouth,
then you feel sort of like you're luxuriating in language.
That's nice, RELI, that's very nice, thank you. So for
some reason, the oi diphthong has gotten a bit of
a bad rap well, because it shows up in moist
(21:20):
and groin goiter gitter. I love giter I just love it.
Should we discuss what an oral dipthong is? Go ahead,
all right, Well we're talking about our gliding vowels in
a one syllable word, so it uh diplong actually translate
literally to two voices or two sounds, so it's not
just like your straightforward um clip right, it's cow ow cow.
(21:46):
That's nice. Yeah, you can't see eventually it's making a
lovely face that she pronounces. And it's too bad we
don't have a video accompaniment of this. We'll see when.
When this brings up this this idea too of um,
you know, these dipthongs and how words feel on our mouth.
It brings up this idea of synthsia, right, and synath
asia is a perceptual condition in which information between the
(22:09):
senses is blended. So if I see a word, I
might see a color as well, or here are sound
podcast about this before we have we've definitely touched on
this before. So this this becomes the question is is
the word a version or word attractions simply something that
is being processed in our brains so that the other
senses are are not just tacking on connotations to it,
(22:31):
but actually trying to take that symbol and reinterpret it
in different modes. Right, And so this is a hypothesis
that David Eagleman and his lab are testing out over
at Baylor. And what they're doing, I mean they basically
if you guys are interested in taking the survey, and
I'm sure they would appreciate it. I took it the
other day interparation for this podcast, and it takes about
(22:53):
fifteen minutes. Although it didn't for me because I don't
think that I have this condition unfortunate, uh so it
didn't really lead me any farther. But this is a
hypothesis that they have out there because nobody really knows
why do we why do we have these word of versions. Yeah,
and I kind of got a couple of clues from
taking in the test. I have to say, oh, you
(23:13):
did take it, Yeah, I did. And some of the
questions were, um, like, you know, did you have migraines
as a child, did you have any hearing loss as
a child, Um, did you have here ear infections? Someone?
And so forth. So I think they're trying to see
whether or not there have been some things crossed in
the brain initially and then um, of course they talk about,
(23:35):
you know, some other continus like a d D and
I don't know if they talk specifically about schizophrenia, but
they're trying to get to the bottom of this, like
what is driving this senestia, this idea that you're looking
at a word and feeling something. In fact, one of
the questions and the questionnaire was do certain words trigger
a taste in your mouth? Example? Does the name Derek
(23:56):
taste like ear wax? I saw that. I love that.
It's so great, Poor Derek. I know all the Derek's
out there, sorry about that. I don't. For me, I
don't the taste of ear waxes not inhabit My mouth
tasted ear wax, definitely, scabs fried chicken, but I don't
have you ever tasted your wax? No, but how do
(24:18):
you just throw off scabs and fried chicken? Like, yeah,
scabs and fried chicken. I know that. Well, Yeah, because
you know, I conducted an experiment when I was younger. Okay,
no longer, this is no longer. I'm just saying, yeah,
I think i'd be really interesting to be a lexical
acoustatory type of sinnis feat. That's right, That's that's the category, right,
(24:39):
it is. Indeed. Yeah, I think I had a bit
of a visual sinnis feet, but I was low on it,
you know, And I think it was more like, hey,
you like to dream up things in your head? There.
All right, let's take a quick break, and when we
get back, we're going to talk about the corporate scrabble
strategy of trying to manipulate language and words to make us,
(25:01):
uh do their bidding. All right, we're back. Did you
do you catch any of the flagged words from either
of the lists in there? Yeah, gossamer, I'm fetching, fetching.
Also very nice, belieguer. What do you think about the leaguer? Okay,
(25:22):
that wasn't in the advertisement, but I like the leaguered.
I like the leaguered better than be leaguer. You're feeling
beliaguered by all the podcast research you had to do.
It's yeah, it's more impactful. But squab squab was on
the list squib squab, scipt squab. So squab is a
kind of bird, right, and uh, for years I've been
(25:43):
saying squibt squab. I didn't realize that that was a
word that had risen to the top of maligned words. Also, cornucopia. Yes,
And in fact, we we have a little thing we're
going to do at the end here, We're going to
construct our own sentences of of words. Oh okay, I
copia shows up in my sentence, by the way. And
I invite listeners to do this as well. Yes, do
(26:05):
do send us your crazy word of vision sentences. Yeah,
because the the idea is, let's see if we can
really make people um sort of wins here. Um all right,
so manipulating language. We've got corporations, h masters at this,
masters at this. And you brought this up the other day.
You were like, you know what, the letters X and Y,
they're used in a lot of products. Excuse me, X
(26:27):
and Z you want to go for those big scrabble
jackpot letters to make them stand out other I don't
know that it does anymore. I just due to the
preponderance of X and z um in particularly pharmaceutical names. Yeah,
and that was the idea right at first, that they
were being used so that they would stand out in
the market. Yeah. I mean think xan X, think Zertech, Zoloft.
(26:50):
What other ones you got, Julie, Um, I don't know
a lot. Zufia are you making that up zinias zium. Yeah,
so it seems like linguists and working in tandem with
corporations could wait into a whole world of trouble. So
(27:10):
you do want to consult the linguists when you're figuring
out what you're gonna name your venerable product. And so
m A lot of corporate corporations have gone with the
X and Z strategy. But I mean there's also just
the word itself. Okay. For example, do you remember when
that tablet called the iPad came out? What is it?
Have you heard of this thing called the yea? Yeah,
(27:32):
that was the thing. Yeah, yeah, that thing where you
do the thing and the thing and then your kid
just takes control of it. Yeah, I know that. Yeah.
So I remember when iPad first came out. I was thinking, huh,
that's really odd that they would name something after you know,
female product, thinking of pads. I was thinking sanitary. I
was thinking of sanitary pads, thank you. And then eventually
(27:56):
the iPad did its iPad thing and took over the
world and is running for you know, world dictatorship, and uh,
the iPad kind of left my brain with its association.
So I think that there's very much a case, again
anecdotally in terms of words ever evolving and in terms
of our own personal associations with those words changing, because
(28:18):
tell you, the truth is kind of flipped now. So
hygiene products I almost think of as sort of sleek,
like an iPad. It's weird the way that works. I thought,
I saw you on on the train the other day, um,
just flipping out a pad and then just kind of
typing on it and looking around and looking like very
self satisfied there. Yeah, I wasn't sure that was a pad,
(28:39):
but now I know, Um, all right, so that that's
this idea, right, that you can reframe and you can
retrain your brain. Um. But I did want to point
out before we talk a little bit more about that,
is that advertisers and linguists who are consulting with them
can also give advertisers a jump by using a little
(29:00):
ation and rhyme where love it. Yeah, I mean we're
talking about you know, when we talk about a literation
and rhyme, nutter butter YouTube on amanopeas right, like Twitter. Absolutely,
these are things that stick in the brain and close
of consonants. These are really important in advertising too, because
these plosive you can already hear plose of consonants cause
(29:21):
the airflow to stop during pronunciation because there's an inclusion
in the mouth, So we're talking about the glottis in
the back of the throat or the tongue, and what
happens is that the pressure of that air builds up
against whatever it is that's including the airway, and then
when it's releases that the air is allowed to pass,
you get a more forceful sound. So okay, so if
(29:45):
it's a more forceful sound, is it a more memorable sound? Well, yeah,
because you're giving a little bit more emphasis to it.
So if I'm you know, close up B or hard
see like or A D A G K A p
R T, there's it's just more powerful powerful, right, No, definitely,
which leads this idea that some words, when they are said,
(30:09):
are going to have you want to say impactful again,
I was going to say more of an emotional impact.
I really was. I wasn't going to do that to
your third time. You're you're kind enough to come on
and hang out with me. So but this kind of
gets this idea of there might be the word that
that you really really dislike, that that could be one
(30:29):
of the reasons why you dislike it besides the cultural
connotation that it has, And I don't know if you're
ready to talk about it or if you want to,
So it's worth pointing out that there's no surprise then
why moist kind of reigns supreme because it has the
connotation for a lot of people, a lot of I
think women in particular, I would be curious to hear
from men if they have the moist word a version. Um.
(30:54):
So it has the connotation like we talked about, and
it also has that that always sound that we don't
really like to say apparently, although I still maintain that
goiter is awesome. It goiter is awesome. But when when
we talk about closives, and I'm not going to make
you say your word, by the way, because it's not
a good word, and I see that you don't want
(31:15):
to say this word, So I'm going to say another
word that is a forceful word, and I'm going to
say it in the context of that movie Dick Tracy.
There are some words that you can just lob around
and they are going to have more of an impact.
I can do this, Julie, I don't have to. This
is an awful word. My my word a version is
to the word that the C word um for women.
(31:38):
It's hard for me to even say. It's hard for
me to talk about. This is the only connection I
have to word a version. I can type all day,
I can type all sorts of things, I can type
weird stuff, I can type impactful over and over and
not have any reaction. But the C word, for me,
it's just it's just one of those words. It's it's
the only word for me that that I have that
reaction to. Yeah, and again this is you've got so
(31:59):
many mean Actually, if you went through the list, you
could just take off everything right. You could say it's
got the closeft consonance two of them, right, and um,
it's got the cultural associations and it's just mean spirited.
So when you lab it at someone, it's got a
lot more force than another word. It's worth noting, though,
that people have attempted to reclaim the word, as I
(32:25):
don't know whether they would be successful. I think there
are a lot of people like me out there or
have this crazy relationship and just a really averse to it.
But I admire the attempt to reclaim Yeah, I do too,
and I understand you that in other parts of the
world that it's not a big deal. In Australia, yeah,
I think it's in Australia, maybe in Britain to you guys,
(32:45):
let me know out there, but it's sort of thrown
around is in a more playful sense. But I think
for for you and obviously women in the United States,
it's one of those things. It's like taken out at
a K forty seven, Julie, Yes, Aliston, have you run
out of creamy? Oh, moist, the putrid, oh, crepuscular? Word
(33:07):
diverse topics for today? I think we have we have.
The only thing I wanted to mention is that not
only you know, is it gonna differ from language the
language what words are are word diversive, word attractive, but
also tonal aspects of it. You didn't get to the
tonal language. Yeah, so if you're speaking in Vietnamese, one
word could mean five different things depending on the way
(33:29):
that you pronounce that word, which then brings up this
whole idea of the musicality of language and how it
affects emotion and how we process. But I think for
the time being, I think it's worth saying that it's
we can all agree that words have emotion, and then
our brains are processing it in a certain way and
everything is pretty much codified. So you take a word
like moist and you start to tease it apart, and
(33:52):
you see that it means a lot of different things
to a lot of different people, and then maybe nothing
to some people. It's pretty fascinating stuff. And gelogists I
would love more talking about the soil, but they're used
to it because they're dealing what they're dealing with soil.
They're dealing with moist soil, so they're dealing with that
bong all day. They probably are like, what's what's up
(34:12):
with moist? I love it. I'm also only going to
describe this. We're taking something valuable away from me when
you say that we should take moist away from the
English language. So do you have your sentence of word
a version or did you already laid on me? I
may have laid it on you with that putrid, crepuscular
business that we were just discussing. Okay, so here's what
I got, here's mine. When the slack wearing, squab loving
(34:36):
man thrust his pinky into his moist, naval and extracted
and impressive amount of crud. He was inspired to create
a new design for bandage, featuring a cornucopia of scaps
the color of fudge. Wells a Julie, well done, Thank you,
thank you. Sorry. If it kind of freaked everybody out
or anybody out, I think we should probably leave it there. Okay,
(34:59):
we'll do yeah, all right. Let us know you guys,
do you have word of versions? Do you have a
sentence of word of versions you'd like to share with us? Oh,
we'd love to hear them. We would really really love
to hear them. And you know, do you have any
thoughts on how we overlay words with intended or unintended
meaning based on our experiences in the world, And did
(35:20):
we leave anything out? Surely we did. Let us know
on Facebook, Twitter, or you can send us a handcrafted
email at blow the Mind at Discovery dot com. Allison,
thank you for counterbalancing my my flemmy tones today with
your dulcet ones and hanging out with us. Julia, is
a pleasure to be here. Oh dude. For more on
(35:45):
this and thousands of other topics, Is that how Stuff
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