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