Word aversions, or logomisia: Why do some words give us the willies?

What’s one of those words that you just can’t stand, that sends a chill up your spine and activates your inner sense of ick?

Many people will immediately think of the word “moist,” which grosses out 10–20% of the English speaking population. The phenomenon of being repulsed by a term is called word aversion or logomisia (Greek logos “word” + misos “hatred”), and there have been some neat, albeit somewhat inconclusive studies into it.

For example, a hilariously titled study from Dr. Paul Thibodeau at Oberlin College attempted to identify whether it is an association that causes word aversion or something about the phonological properties of the words.

With “moist,” it could be both or either. The word just gets worse the farther back you look at its origins: It’s suspected to be a French spinoff of the Latin mucidus “slimy, moldy, musty,” and is ultimately related to the word “mucus,” which in my opinion, is worse.

One option is that it’s phonological. That is, facial muscle activation when saying the word helps generate an emotional response. Is it the “moi” combination that does it—that slippery feeling between your lips—and if so, why do moisture and moisturizer feel less icky to many people?

In Thibodeau’s study, participants said they disliked it because of the sound, but the study suggests that it has more to do with thematic associations. People who disliked moist also reacted more strongly to related words like wet and damp, as well as bodily-function words like phlegm, puke and vomit. They showed much less consistent extra disgust toward words that merely sounded similar, like foist and hoist. Participants who hated moist rated it as far more aversive, responded with words like “eww” and “yuck” in a free-association task, and remembered seeing it more often in a surprise recall test.

Interestingly, Thibodeau also found that “word aversion is more prevalent among younger, more educated, and more neurotic people, and is more commonly reported by females than males.”

Linguistics professor Jason Riggle suggests that slimy, slippery, bodily things, as well as sexual things, may have an associative impact on word aversion. “The [words] evoke nausea and disgust rather than, say, annoyance or moral outrage,” he told Slate in 2013. “And the disgust response is triggered because the word evokes a highly specific and somewhat unusual association with imagery or a scenario that people would typically find disgusting—but don’t typically associate with the word.”

For example, panties, crud, drool, crevice, suck, nipple, ointment, ooze, clammy, dank, sticky, plop, phlegm, and musty are all commonly cited as uncomfortable words on forums such as Language Log, phonetician Mark Liberman’s collaborative language blog. (Sorry.)

But there are also less obvious ones. Although the words above receive their fair share of hate on Language Log, other folks reported disliking the words slacks, meal, luggage, pugilist, wedge, hardscrabble, squab, and guppy, and they seem to be primarily based on mouthfeel. Personally, I really like the words whimsy, baffle, and cornucopia, but it turns out a lot of people don’t.

Surely it’s about context, too. For instance, cheese is delicious. But the word cheese feels most at home in culinary situations and gets a bit dodgy when it’s associated with bodily secretions and such.