The latest episode of the new podcast Subtitle is about "Words we love to hate". Full disclosure: Kavita Pillay interviewed me for the program, and so you can hear my voice from time to time. More later — I'm off to Washington DC for a workshop on "Digital Cognitive and Functional Biomarkers" organized by the […]
Paul Thibodeau et al., "An Exploratory Investigation of Word Aversion", COGSCI 2014: Why do people self-report an aversion to words like “moist”? The present study represents an initial scientific exploration into the phenomenon of word aversion by investigating its prevalence and cause. We find that as many as 20% of the population equates hearing the […]
Matthew J.X. Malady summarizes readers' comments on his Slate "word aversion" piece — "Which Words Do Slate Readers Hate?", 4/2/2013: Hundreds of commenters chimed in to report aversions keyed to words extending from apple to zesty. Among the others mentioned: foyer, salad, hose, lapel, plethora, funicular, groin, nostril, and munch. Several commenters noted an aversion […]
Matthew J.X. Malady, "Why Do We Hate Certain Words?", Slate 4/1/2013: The George Saunders story “Escape From Spiderhead,” included in his much praised new book Tenth of December, is not for the squeamish or the faint of heart. The sprawling, futuristic tale delves into several potentially unnerving topics: suicide, sex, psychotropic drugs. It includes graphic […]
Language Log readers who have been following our recent posts on word aversion and word attraction will want to check out Kristi Gustafson's article in the Albany Times Union, "Words we love, words we hate," which quotes Barbara Wallraff and me on the subject. As evidence for lexical likes and dislikes, I discuss some of […]
Yesterday in one of my classes, a female student from China said that she didn't like to exercise in the morning because she felt "wet". At first, I couldn't believe my ears, so I asked her, "Did you say 'wet'?" "Yes," she said, "wet". I couldn't understand in what way she would feel "wet" in […]
Before reading the following article, I didn't even know there was a St. Victor, let alone an Abbey of St. Victor that was established in 1108 near Notre-Dame Cathedral, at the beginning of the "Twelfth-Century Renaissance", in Paris. The surprising history of architectural drawing in the West The subtle art of elevation. Architectural drawing […]
On Twitter, @muffkin7 asks readers to "Ruin a film by inserting the word 'moist' into its title". Ruin a film by inserting the word ‘moist’ into its title. — muffkin (@muffkin7) April 27, 2020 Answers include "Gone moist with the wind", "All moist about Eve", "The good, the bad, the moist, and the ugly", "Little […]
Below is a guest post from Kavita Pillay, co-host of the new Subtitle podcast. Do you hate a seemingly normal word for reasons that you can't quite pinpoint? Or, are there words that you love to say out loud? If so, the Subtitle podcast (more on us below) wants to hear from you! On Nov. […]
Helen Wang writes: I have a question – what's the etymology of the English word "mouthfeel"? In the last few weeks in the UK I have heard the word "mouthfeel" several times, spoken very naturally as though it's an established English word. I was surprised because I remember kǒugǎn 口感 (lit. "mouth-feel") as being "untranslatable" […]
Alison Flood, "Oxford Dictionaries halts search for most disliked word after 'severe misuse'", The Guardian 8/26/2016 The #OneWordMap, an online survey soliciting readers’ least favourite words, is abandoned after site is flooded with offensive choices It was intended to be a lighthearted quest to find the least popular word in the English language, but only […]
Oxford University Press has published the fourth edition of Fowler's Dictionary of Modern English Usage. The name "Fowler" has been retained as a source of prestige, but this is really the work of editor Jeremy Butterfield (as the third edition was the work of Robert Burchfield). Butterfield has already been getting some press attention for […]