@myl Your list of counter examples (baffle, squab, meal, chunky, wedge) is interesting. Not to go all sesquiotica (http://sesquiotic.wordpress.com/) on you, but could the folk etymology connecting "squaw" to vagina(http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Squaw#Claims_of_obscene_meaning) have infested people's feeling's about squab? Is an aversion to "squab" ever attested prior to the Oprah episode in 1992 which popularized the false etymology? Chunky is related to vomit via "to blow chunks". Wedge gets toward "wet" or "whet", and wet, of course, has similar associations as moist. I got nothing for "baffle" or "meal", though.

But, of course, if these loose homonyms really were the source of the aversion, then why wouldn't people express aversion to the homonym (squaw or wet, for instance) directly? We could construct a theory of repression and transference (perhaps it's more socially acceptable to state an aversion to "squab" rather than "squaw"), but that would obviously be reaching towards the hypothesis I was trying to evidence to begin with. Which is why I'm interested in any examples from other languages and cultures where the loci of disgust might be a bit different.

There seems to be an element of randomness to all this. For example why don't we hear more complaints about how awful a word "jump" is? Three quarters of this word is the legit phonaestheme -ump, of such words as bump, lump, dump, stump, hump, rump, clump, plump, mumps, and crumple, all of which signify masses or protrusions from a surface (or, for the verb, making one) and all of which have, to my mind, a rather coarse feel to them. Which is curiously lacking in "jump" even though it may be semantically connected.

and Dennis Potter's Singing Detective. "What's the loveliest word in the English language, officer? In the sound it makes in the mouth? In the shape it makes in the page? E-L-B-O-W."

Hardscrabble is in the 2008 Chambers (with the annotation "Chiefly US"). The only place I have come across it is in Cormac McCarthy's novels.

This seems to support Scott Schulz's hypothesis that the content is really what's significant here, and the purported objections to sound, etc. are derived from unconscious post-hoc rationalizations. Otherwise, why would the phenomenon follow the dialect across these two very different words?

I'm ambivalent about your comment. On the one hand, my sense about these aversions is that they're more often about semantic associations, rather than phonology, than many people claim. Or, more precisely, my sense is that it's more likely such associations than not.

On the other hand, something that's bothered me about these discussions is how often people try to argue for some simple, universal theory — that's it's "really" about the associations or "really" just phonology. Because it's just not that simple. It's certainly not that simple in general, but it's not even that simple with individual words. I feel certain that in many or most of these cases, the etiology of the negative conditioning against a particular word varies from person to person. When some person explains that it really and truly is, for them personally, just an aversion to the sound of "moist", I am willing to believe them and not presume to second guess their own attested experience. When they attempt to project their own experience onto everyone else as their explanation for a word aversion, that's something different.

I guess most of us tend to want a grand unified theory of word aversion, but I feel certain that's not going to happen. Why do people have food aversions? Well, sometimes, it's because of negative associations and/or incidents earlier in their lives, often childhood. Other times, it's just because. Does it make sense to try to explain all food likes and dislikes, or all aesthetic likes and dislikes, on the basis of some culturally universal association, or on presumed specific childhood experiences? No, it doesn't. The same is true of word aversions.

I'll grant, based only on my own (fallible) personal intuition, that semantic associations are more likely than other explanations, all else being equal. But that's not a very reliable guide.

Well it's not in my 1998 OED nor my 1980 Chambers (both hard copies).

[(myl) Please grow up. The OED's publication history for this word is as follows:

And simple web search should have convinced you that it doesn't belong in a category for which "Are these even words?" is a reasonable non-troll-like question. Whether it's a word that you know, or a word that's found in your 1980 Chambers, is irrelevant to the original discussion.]

Longstanding US term, though it might be, it has not entered the UK lexicon, as far as I know.

I picked it out deliberately. Although it is a word which I have never ever heard or read (to my recollection), it does immediately convey a sense of severe physical discomfort, which might be connected to people's aversion to it. Or not, given the avowed aversion to pretty neutral-seeming words.