America’s ‘moist’-haunted — why some words repel

Moist. Luggage. Crevice. Stroke. Slacks. Phlegm. How do those words make you feel? Certain everyday words drive some people crazy, a phenomenon that experts call “word aversion.”

But one word appears to rise above all others: “moist.” For that reason, a recent paper in the journal PLOS One used the word as a stand-in to explore why people find some terms repellent.

“It doesn’t really fit into a lot of existing categories for how people think about the psychology of language,” the study’s author, Paul Thibodeau, a professor of psychology at Oberlin College in Ohio, said of moist. “It’s not a taboo word, it’s not profanity, but it elicits this very visceral disgust reaction.”

A little less than a quarter of the approximately 2,500 unique sub- jects tested in Thibodeau’s five experiments over four years had trouble dealing with any appearance of the word.

When asked to react to moist in a free-association task, about onethird of those people responded with “an expression of disgust,” Thibodeau said.

The peer-reviewed study attempted to explain why moist had become the linguistic equivalent of nails on a chalkboard for some people.

Words that sound similar — including hoist, foist and rejoiced — did not put off participants in the same way, suggesting that aversion to the word was not based on the way it sounds.

But people who were bothered by moist also found that words for bodily fluids — vomit, puke and phlegm — largely struck a nerve. That led Thibodeau to conclude that for those people, moist had taken on the connotations of a bodily function.

It has long been acknowledged that many people are cursed with moistphobia.

In 2007, a linguistics professor from the University of Pennsylvania, Mark Liberman, wrote about moist in exploring the concept of word aversion. In 2012, the word came up again, after the New Yorker asked readers which words they would eliminate from the English language. Thibodeau’s study cites People magazine’s 2013 attempt to have some of its “sexiest men” make “the worst word sound hot!” (Look up the video online.)

But Jason Riggle, a linguistics professor at the University of Chicago, said the excessive focus on moist may have made a broader understanding of word aversion more difficult. “Moist has become such a flagship word for this, and the fact that so many people talk about it now makes it harder to get a handle on” the issue more generally, he said.

That may help explain why other recent studies on word aversion, unlike Thibodeau’s, found a close link between a word’s phonological properties — its combination of sounds — and people’s reactions.

David Eagleman, a neuroscientist at the Baylor College of Medicine in Texas, found that an unusual combination of sounds in a group of made-up words was more likely to put people off than several other factors. Eagleman suspects that word aversion is similar to synesthesia, the blending of senses in which an aural phenomenon, such as a musical note, can trigger a visual or even an emotional response. He suggested that the process through which a specific combination of sounds evokes disgust might be similar.