Why Is There So Much Hate for the Word “Moist”? - Facts So Romantic
▻http://nautil.us/blog/-why-is-there-so-much-hate-for-the-word-moist
A lot of people don’t like the word “moist.” Several Facebook groups are dedicated to it, one with over 3,000 likes, New Yorker readers overwhelmingly selected it as the word to eliminate from the dictionary, and Jimmy Fallon sarcastically thanked it for being the worst word in the English language. When you ask people why this might be, there is no shortage of armchair theory: that there’s something about the sounds involved, that it puts your face in a position similar to the facial expression of disgust, or that it reminds people of mold or sex.Psychologist Paul Thibodeau and his colleagues ran a study to sort it out. They gave participants a set of words and asked them to rate how, whether, and to what degree, each word made them uncomfortable.Twenty-one percent of the people in the (...)