Grammar Girl’s Interview with Jade Wu (Full Transcript)
Please Note: This is a word-for-word computer generated transcript. It reflects the way the people spoke and is not meant to be an edited article.
Mignon: Grammar Girl here. I’m Mignon Fogarty, and you can think of me as your friendly guide to the English language—writing, history, rules, and cool stuff. Today, I have some cool stuff because I’m going to talk with Jade Wu about words that cause people to have negative physical reactions. Jade is the host of the Savvy Psychologist podcast at Quick and Dirty Tips, and I thought she’d be perfect to give us some insight on why people can have such strong feelings about words.
Mignon: OK. Hi, Jade, it’s good to talk to you today.
Jade: Good to talk to you. I’m so glad to be here.
Mignon: Yeah, you bet. So when we first talked about doing a show about words that bother people, like physically bother them, we thought it might be something called misophonia, which means “hated sound.” But then then you told me it was actually called word aversion. So what’s the difference between those two things?
Jade: Yeah. That’s that’s a great question. I actually thought those were the same thing, too, until I really looked into it. So misophonia is when someone has a major aversive reaction to sounds, usually bodily sounds like chewing, foot tapping, sometimes some types of voices, usually nasally voices. And people can have this aversion to specific people making those noises. And usually the reaction is one of anger. And people even say that it’s like a rage kind of feeling.
Mignon: Wow.
Jade: Whereas for word aversion, it’s specifically words that people are averse to, whether it’s even just seeing the word or hearing the words said. Often people say, I can’t even bring myself to say this word. And it’s more of like a physical, visceral disgust reaction rather than an anger reaction.
Mignon: Wow.
Jade: If that makes sense as a, as a difference between the two things.
Mignon: Yeah. So sort of anger versus disgust on that…oh, I’ve never heard people say they can’t even say the word. That’s interesting. So, yeah, when I asked people to tell me about words they had a negative physical reaction to, I got a lot of people instead telling me about their pet peeves. But they also, some of the people, described them as physical reactions. So I actually couldn’t quite tell. Here are two examples.
Jade: Mm hmm.
Caller 1: Hey, Grammar Girl. I follow you, and I love all that you do. The word that just makes my blood boil is “conversate.” I just wanted to call to give my [?] “conversate” is not a word, people.
Caller 2: Hey, Mignon, calling from California here. My dreaded word is “veggie.” I hate seeing it. I hate hearing it. I hate everything about it. And to cap it off, when vegetarians say “I’m veggie”–that just makes my skin crawl.
Mignon: So what is happening when people say “it makes my skin crawl” or “it makes my blood boil”? I’m guessing it’s a figure of, just a figure of speech and not an actual description of a physical sensation because the blood isn’t actually boiling. What do you think?
Jade: Yeah, that’s so hard to say because I think there maybe is a blurry line between pet peeve and word aversion. The way I like to think about it is if the word brings about this reaction, no matter the context, then maybe that’s word aversion. Whereas if it’s okay in some contexts, for example, I hear a lot of people say that they really don’t like it when people say “literally” when they don’t mean “literally”–when they mean “figuratively.” So that seems to me like a pet peeve.
Mignon: Mm hmm.
Jade: And whereas if it’s something that just feels kind of viscerally disgusting, no matter what the context it’s used in, then maybe that’s more word aversion. But it’s really hard to tell. There’s, there’s not enough exhaustive research, I think, showing, you know, where the line is drawn between the two.
Mignon: Okay. Yeah. Well, we can’t really talk about word aversion without talking about the word “moist.” It always comes up. Here’s an example.
Caller 3: I saw your prompt about words that give you a strong negative reaction. And I have two to share. One is the adjective “moist.” I think a lot of people that I have met have strong negative reactions to that word. And I’ve never been clear on exactly why it is. But it is really yucky to a lot of people.
Jade: Huh.
Mignon: And so do you have any idea why one, why so many people are bothered by the word “moist”? And then I was thinking like you might describe a cake as moist. And I don’t know if that bothers people or not. And you were saying it kind of depended on the context. So I’m wondering if you know anything about that.
Jade: Yeah. So “moist.” And by the way, apologies to all the listeners out there who really hate this word. Right. Sorry. You’re gonna be hearing it a few times in this podcast. Well, we’ll try not to say it too much, I guess, but yeah, about 10 to 20 percent of people who speak English, I guess, really hate the word “moist” and, and it’s really hard to say why this is. I mean, some, some have speculated that always because this word kind of reminds people of kind of icky sexual images. But there are other words that are sexual and people aren’t averse to those. And in fact, some people are really, you know, have positive reactions to sexual words. So it it’s probably not that. And some other people have said, “Oh, maybe it’s just a bandwagon.” Like somehow it kind of caught on that people say they hate “moist.” And now suddenly everybody hates that word. But I don’t think that’s true either, because just so many people have independently said that they hate this word. Yeah. And that’s the very few studies that do exist, show that people really do have a very quick sort of visceral reaction to this word that we don’t think it’s just a social kind of bandwagon that people jump on to some other hypotheses.
Jade: This, this is one really interesting hypothesis that I have no idea about whether it’s true or not true or not. But some speculate that speaking these words that are commonly averse to people uses the same facial muscles that mimic disgust facial expressions. So, for example, the I’m actually not familiar with this term, but zygomatic muscles. Are you familiar with.
Mignon: No, no, I’m not.
Jade: Apparently, these are the muscles in your face that helped to make the “ew” sound. So people were speculating. “Well, so when something’s really gross, you say ‘ew.’ And so if you need to say you or if you use those muscles, then maybe that automatically triggers a disgust response.” But there are also so many words (like “panties” is another commonly averse word) that don’t use those muscles at all. So I’m not sure that it’s quite that. So I think the main debate is between is it a phonological issue or is it a semantic issue? Like do people not like the sounds or do they not like the meaning attached to the word?
Mignon: Right. Well, one of the things I noticed in the calls is that a lot of the words did describe some kind of icky physical thing, like like pus, for example. And so when you were talking about the triggering of the disgust reaction, it did remind me of that, because there are so many things where, you know, if you saw it, it might be disgusting.
Jade: And so, yeah, yeah, yeah. I actually went and sort of took a very informal survey. And here are some of the–so apologies in advance if you’re averse to all of these words–but some of the very common ones I found were polyp, boil, pus (which you already mentioned,) slurp, gut, belly… let’s see… There were, gelatinous was also another one. Saliva, sputum, sputum, spit, puke, mucus, chunk. So these are all pretty physical bodily function, bodily fluid-type words. But there were also others that were not related to that, like slacks, luggage. Oh, blouse. Cloying, although that could be related to something bodily related if it’s taste-related. And ointment, huh? So those were the common ones that I was able to find.
Mignon:Do researcher know anything about the kinds of people who get so bugged or disgusted by these words?
Jade:So. So apparently the prototypical moist averse person is a young, neurotic female who is well educated and somewhat disgusted by bodily function. Huh. So. Huh. So apparently younger people, people who are more prone to anxiety, female and people who are more educated.
Mignon:I wonder if that means so. I wonder if that means you can grow out of it, huh?
Jade:Maybe. Yeah. And this, by the way, also largely overlaps with the profile of the prototypical, prototypical person that’s most sensitive to disgust. So everything is set for the high education part. Young neurotic females tend to be more sensitive to disgust than other profiles.
Mignon:And how is neurotic defined neurotic?
Jade:So this was pulled from one of five main personality traits, usually called the big five. They are that you can use the acronym Ocean. It’s open as to experience conscientiousness, extroversion, agreeableness and neuroticism. So neuroticism, it just basically means how prone someone is to anxiety. And there’s a little bit of rigidity in there, does a little bit of proneness to bad moods and depression in there. So it’s kind of an overall capture of proneness to negative feelings.
MignonOkay. So then that might make sense that they also would feel more negatively about words. Yeah, that could be. Oh, that’s super interesting. Mm hmm. Yeah.
Mignon: I wonder. I bet you don’t know the answer to this, but I wonder. What about it in other languages, too? Are these words, do people who speak languages other than English also find these same words disgusting or troublesome because they would sound different in other languages?
Jade: Yeah, that’s I think that is the question to ask. I think that would pretty much answer the debate, but I don’t know the answer to that. I don’t, I couldn’t find anything on that. And that was one of my first questions, too, is, you know, do other do people who speak other languages have similar reactions? And also, if someone learns language as a second language, which I did. My first language is Chinese, and I learned English starting at the age of 11. And, you know, do we ESL speakers have any of these same reactions? I personally don’t, but I don’t know if that’s because English is my second language or just because I’m one of those lucky people who don’t have word aversion.
Mignon: You know, it’s so interesting. Maybe someone will study it some day.
Jade: Yeah. That would be so interesting. Yeah.
Mignon: OK, we’re going to take a quick break for our sponsor, and when we come back, we’re going to talk about words that come to be associated with emotions through experience, how researchers are actually measure word aversion, and we’ll have some more stories from listeners about words they hate.
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Mignon: Another thing that came up is sometimes words seemed to bother people because they had negative or sad associations. Here’s an example of one of those calls I got.
Caller 4: Hi, Mignon. A word I really hate is the word “widower.” My wife recently passed away, and there’s so many cool stories about the Merry Widow and the Black Widow. And widow this, and rich widow that. A widower is such an ugly, awful word. And I hate it when people ask about my marital status. So that’s my new one. Thanks a lot. Bye bye.
Mignon: So is that a common reaction to suddenly be bothered by words that didn’t bother you before when you’re in a new sad situation or maybe a traumatic situation?
Jade: I don’t. I’m not sure. I mean, I fully believe that words like “widower” could be very triggering for some people and very unpleasant for understandable reasons. I don’t know if it’s quite the same mechanism as the other type of word aversion that we were talking about. Because, for example, there’s a study that focuses on the word “moist” and the, you know, 10 to 20 percent of the people in this set of studies that are averse to it. They pretty much all said that they have always had this aversion to this word since childhood, since as long as they could remember. So it seems like it’s not something that’s learned or triggered by certain events. And it also seems like people are a little bit dumbfounded by why they are averse to certain words. So if you can sort of pinpoint, oh, this is something that happened in my life. And after this happened, I developed an aversion to this word for this very understandable reason, then that may not be the same type of word version as as with “moist.”
Mignon: You know, I was wondering, you were talking about studies that people had done with these words, and how are they measuring aversion? Is it a physical thing or are they measuring skin conductance or brainwaves or something like that? How are they measuring?
Jade: Yeah, I wish they were because that would be really, really interesting. But unfortunately, there are only three studies that I could find on word aversion and two of them are done by the same group. So really, there are two groups of researchers that have ever studied this that I could find, and they both used really cool experimental designs, but they all exclusively, exclusively relied on people to self-report level of aversion. But they did use some really cool techniques to try to piece together what word aversion is all about. So, for example, one study, super interesting. They focus on the M-word. And so what they did was had people rate their level of aversion to this word, and then they also made up nonsense words that sound similar like “croist.” C-R-O-I-S-T. Or they made up nonsense words that do not sound like the M-word like “fluffle.” And they had people rate the level of attractiveness or aversiveness of these made up words. And they found that “croist” was more aversive than “fluffle.” So that would seem to support the hypothesis that is something phonological going on, right? That there’s something about the “oist” sound that people really don’t like. But on the other hand, there’s also some contradictory data, too, from one of the other studies which showed that, you know, it’s actually about the semantics, it’s about the meaning of the word. Where people rated also “wet” and “damp” as also very aversive. So it’s it’s really hard to say what exactly it’s about. These two studies seem to show different things.
Mignon: Are there any studies that show that people like certain sounds, like maybe the M-sound in “mom” or, you know, something like that?
Jade: I couldn’t find anything on that. My intuition would say that there are words people like more. For example, when I said “fluffle,” that just sounded better than “croist,” right? I don’t know. I don’t know if that’s just me or if I’m imagining it, but there was something really intuitive about that. And I’ve also heard someone mention, though, the phrase “cellar door.” All right. It’s really nice to them. And I agree with that. But I can’t put my finger on why. And I couldn’t. I didn’t see any studies on that, too, to really systematically figure out why that is.
Mignon: Right. Yeah. Now that you mentioned it, I think that’s what got us started on this whole topic: we both had seen that “cellar door” idea.
Jade: Yeah. It’s so interesting. And part of me wonders, too, you know, am I biased because I’m researching this topic, and I know what I’m supposed to look for, because also one of these studies, there was some evidence that you can sort of learn to be aversive. I know that earlier I said that you can’t really learn to be aversive, but it seems like you can be manipulated at least a little bit. So in the study about the M-word, they in one of the sub-studies, they showed participants either a video of people talking up why the word is so aversive. And, you know, their theories about why it’s aversive so, they’re very much primed to think that it’s aversive. So then that then they rated how what, you know, how they feel about the word. Another group of participants watched a video about baking cakes and then they they rated how averse the word is, and they did actually find a difference. The people who are primed to think that the word was unpleasant did rated as more aversive. And they even said that they use it less in real life than people who watched the cake baking video. So there is some room for suggestion or room for manipulation, although it still does seem that there is a pretty clear difference between feeling averse and not feeling averse to a word. If that makes sense.
Mignon: Yeah. Yeah. I want to end with probably the most interesting call I got when I asked people to tell me about the words that bothered them. This one was from a librarian and she had a problem with a lot of words. But at the end she says she doesn’t even like the look of a certain word. So listen to this one.
Caller 5: Hi, Mignon. My name’s Jane Faulkner. I’m a librarian out at UC Santa Barbara, and I’m also an editor. So you are one of my most listened to podcasts. I love your comments on everything, especially grammar. Anyway, I just saw your post about visceral, or words that give us a visceral negative reaction. And I’ll keep mine short even though it’s much longer than this. But these are my biggies: Cake, especially when used like a cake of soap, rice, salt, belly, panties (you’re gonna get that a lot) and pop. I don’t like that when it’s used as a verb, like pop it in the oven. Custard and custody, and visually, I don’t like the word “tea” for some reason. T-E-A. Anyway, the list goes on. But there you go.
Mignon: So what are your thoughts about that? Can you say anything about not liking even the look of the word “tea”?
Jade: Yeah, I don’t know. That is so interesting. That I think is a little bit more rare. Although I did come across one respondent to a New York Times, New York Times article about word aversion. The article said, “Oh, go ahead and tell us, you know, what words you find averse.” And one respondent actually used the little star sign. The asterisk sign to spell out a word or two, I guess, replace a word that they couldn’t even bring themselves to type out. And so obviously, they weren’t physically saying it when they were typing it. They didn’t have to hear it said back to them. They just had to type it out on the keyboard, and they couldn’t even do that. So I find that so interesting that, that maybe, I don’t know, maybe that supports the idea that it’s something phonological about the word that really just triggers like the shape of the word, the sound of the word. When you see it spelled out, maybe you automatically imagine what it sounds like. And maybe that’s what really drives this sense of, oh, I can’t even look at it.
Mignon: Well, yeah, it’s so interesting. You know, we, I, we try to focus so much on the practical aspect, on the rules, but people get really emotional about words, too. So I think this has been really interesting for sure.
Jade: Yeah, it’s it’s really surprising sometimes to me how much emotion is brought about by words, especially negative emotions like aggravation, or anger, or disgust. I’m kind of surprised by how many people were really like, had really strong emotional reactions to words, whether it was because it was a pet peeve or a more traditional word version.
Mignon: All right. Well, thank you. That was Jade Wu, the host of the Savvy Psychologist podcast. If you liked our discussion, you should definitely listen to more from her. Anywhere you find my podcast, you can find hers. Thanks for being with me here today, Jade. I really appreciate it.
Jade: Of course, there was a real pleasure. Thank you.
Mignon: You bet.
Mignon: I’m Mignon Fogarty, better known as Grammar Girl. You can find me and the Savvy Psychologist at the home of my podcast network, QuickAndDirtyTips.com.
Mignon: And remember to check out my new video course on LinkedIn Learning. I worked with their experts in educational video design to choose what I think are my 17 best tips to help you write better fast, and then to turn those tips into easy, pleasant videos. The whole set is only 40 minutes, and both the editors I worked with said that even just reading the scripts helped them start writing better right away. If you don’t already have access to LinkedIn Learning, they have a 30-day free trial, so there’s no reason not to watch it. Go to LinkedIn Learning, get yourself signed up if you aren’t already, and then search for my course, Grammar Girl’s Quick and Dirty Tips for Better Writing.
Mignon: Thank you to my producer Nathan Semes, and thank you to all the callers who saw my question on Twitter and shared your stories. Thanks for listening.