Word Routes
Exploring the pathways of our lexicon
Which Words Do You Love and Which Do You Hate?
Sometimes our perspective on language isn't exactly rational: we love some words and absolutely despise other ones. What inspires such deep feelings, and why does word hate often seem to run hotter than word love? In the case of words like impactful, discussed in yesterday's Red Pen Diaries, the bad vibes may arise because of an association with vacuous management-speak or other institutional jargon. But other times a word is disliked because it just sounds, well, icky. A look at some of the favorite and least favorite words selected by Visual Thesaurus and Vocabulary.com subscribers offers some insight on verbal attractions and aversions.
As I explained in an article in yesterday's Albany Times Union, we can learn a lot from the words that our subscribers select as "favorite" and "least favorite" in their user profiles. First, let's accentuate the positive: the word selected most often as favorite is... love. This is followed by the similarly feel-good terms serendipity, Grace, and peace. It's interesting that serendipity ranks so highly, but its appeal is self-evident: it has a distinctive and engaging meaning ("good luck in making unexpected and fortunate discoveries"), and it's also fun to say. That winning combination of enjoyable sound and sense is identifiable in some other highly liked words: pulchritude, eclectic, Schadenfreude, perspicacious, mellifluous, syzygy, discombobulate, and lagniappe.
Such words might inspire warm feelings, but they don't hold a candle to the visceral reaction that many people have for certain disliked words. Among our subscribers, the word that appears most often as "least favorite" is hate — not surprising, since it's often paired with the overall favorite love. The runners-up are no, like, and impossible. No and impossible are words that anyone with a can-do spirit would want to avoid. Meanwhile, people who dislike like think it's, like, overused. Overuse is also to blame for the appearance of whatever, nice, and awesome among the least favorite words.
The word that comes next on the "least favorite" leaderboard is moist. Many people feel quite strongly about moist — there's even a Facebook group called "I HATE the word MOIST!" with more than 300 members. One Facebooker calls moist "possibly the worst word in the English dictionary," while another says, "I despise the sick, repugnant word!" It's hard to top the aversion felt for moist, but some other "least favorites" can provoke similar reactions: panty/panties, vomit, ointment, and slacks.
It's difficult to find any unifying thread for these words that get people's goat. But much like the enjoyable words on the "favorites" list like serendipity and mellifluous, there's a certain sound/sense combination that sparks these word aversions. Why does moist merit a Facebook group of haters, while hoist and joist go unnnoticed? It's more than just the sound of the word: the disliked words tend to have some basic level of ickiness. As I told the Albany Times Union, this ickiness can have to do with slimy stuff, bodily discharge, or other things that people would prefer not to think about. Icky words include nostril, crud, pus, and pimple. Ointment and goiter share the "oi" sound with moist: there must be something about that diphthong that gets under people's skin.
These reactions are extremely variable — very often women react more negatively than men (as is the case for moist), and everyone seems to have his or her own idiosyncratic likes and dislikes. Kristi Gustafson of the Times Union is so annoyed by the word vigil that she has to turn down the volume on the television when the word comes up in the news. These deep-seated sentiments about words are very often inexplicable. The Monty Python troupe had fun with these seemingly arbitrary tastes in their sketch about lovely "woody" words and dreadful "tinny" words. (YouTube video here, transcript here.)
What are your own personal "woody" and "tinny" words? Let us know in the comments below. And if you're a subscriber to the Visual Thesaurus or Vocabulary.com, make sure you edit your profile (by clicking on your name in the top right corner of any page) to select your favorite and least favorite words. We'll continue to keep track of your lexical cheers and jeers.
[Update: Welcome, BoingBoing readers!]
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Comments from our users:
"I could not go with them AS I had a doctor's appointment."
I can't explain my revulsion about that word. It always seems to me that anyone using the construction is being unforgivably careless. I have to remind myself that it is just me.
The word in my profile that I officially dislike is IRREGARDLESS. That one has been beaten to death.
I don't know why but this word makes me cringe
On the other hand, this past year I've become fond of "bloviate." It's become my word of the year. I had started to refer to a bragging coworker as a bloviator, and the word got stuck in my head and won't go away. It sounds like what it means.
As for words I love, gentle comes to mine, and father. These are words that have calmed me, the first the manner of my husband, and the second, obvious, a deep attachment to my late father.
I hope we can adjust these. It might make an interesting study of how our moods change with events, the time of postings and other thoughts that creep in at wee hours.
Did I spell creep correctly? Sigh.
'A hot meal portion'
Ooohh eeeee. Yuk.
I just loved the Monty Python speech when the character Dennis responds to King Arthur's assertion that Arthur had became King because the Lady of the Lake held out Excalibur to him:
"...if I went 'round saying I was an emperor just because some moistened bint had lobbed a scimitar at me, they'd put me away!"
Excellent! "Moistened" is the perfect word! Especially coming on the heels of the previous line, "... you can't expect to wield supreme executive power just 'cause some watery tart threw a sword at you!"
(I'm laughing out loud again.)
Daniel- I can appreciate your frustration with our spelling differences. I read quite a bit of material that's been published in the UK and sometimes quite accidentally spell a word in the way it would be spelled in the UK. My friends think my education was for naught at those times, poor things.
Pamela- absolutely delightful! Thank you so much.
Some words, like ageing, just have to be spelled THAT way! I think it's the Brit way, rather than ours, but I've lost track completely!
Just be brave, Daniel. We will arrive at one spelling eventually. Give us a century or two.
civilisation
spread to all across the globe:
civilization.
It's a busy life in Camelot
I have to push the pram a lot.
(Obviously, the word is used here because they couldn't think of one other way to make the rhyme.)
Love 'delight' and wish I were more often 'delighted'. "Willow" is a soft melody to me.
I had a Cuban Spanish teacher in HS who thought that one of the most melodious phrases in English is "cellar door" - and it is lovely.
I am with everyone who hates "whatever." Its pervasive use says something scary about our society.
I like ineffable and grove and sentimental. I don't much like words with a squawk in them, like squalid.
My family used the word "peaked" pronounced in two syllables, to mean not feeling well, under the weather. I love that word and also the old-fashioned pronunciations of beloved and blessed. When my professor in divinity school told me I should shorten my pronunciation of blessed to one syllable sounding like "blest" I was sorely disappointed. Doesn't bless-ed sound much better?
The best phrase in our language: "post-season play" both for sound and for its delightful promise.
What's the matter with forming proper sentences ?
Being European and now living in Los Angeles I find this the most annoying word.
Re: awesome. Yes, overused, although not as much as in its heyday, about 15 years ago. When I hear it, I remember my 3-year-old son describing something as "toady awesome." So think about that funny, sweet (another favorite) phrase next time you hear the obnoxious adjective.