These are a few of my least favourite words
Meal. Decent. Bowl.
What do these seemingly inoffensive words have in common?
I hate them.
I don’t hate what they represent—I have no aversion to a sizeable repast served to me in an appropriate vessel—I just hate the words themselves. And no, I don’t know why.
And, according to Slate, neither does science.
The pointy-heads over at Language Log at least have a name for my condition. It’s called ‘word aversion’, which they describe as:
a feeling of intense, irrational distaste for the sound or sight of a particular word or phrase, not because its use is regarded as etymologically or logically or grammatically wrong, nor because it’s felt to be over-used or redundant or trendy or non-standard, but simply because the word itself somehow feels unpleasant or even disgusting.
Got it in a slightly verbose nutshell, Professor Mark Liberman. And the important word in his definition is ‘irrational’. Why would I hate a harmless little four-letter word like ‘bowl’? Beats me. It’s irrational.
There is a middle ground between words that people don’t like because of their associations (moist, slimy, underpants) and words that people dislike, well … just because (see first paragraph). Former editor of New York magazine Kurt Andersen posted a list of Words We Don’t Say that were verboten in his magazine. Those words are on his list partly because they’re clichés and indicate lazy writing, but also because Kurt thought they were stupid, or wrong, or just … annoying—words such as dubbed, celeb, overly, penned and maven.
But because there hasn’t been much scholarly research into this pressing issue, science doesn’t really have a clue why I hate ‘meal’, ‘decent’ and ‘bowl’ (and I do hate them).
So, in the same spirit that Brian Wilson of the Beach Boys asked listeners to ‘send us a letter and tell us the name of your favourite vegetable’, why don’t you drop Red Pony an email and tell us the word that fills you with flesh-crawling revulsion? It’s all in the interests of science.
