MOIST MOIST MOIST... eww...

moist
/mɔɪst/adjective

1.slightly wet."the moist, fertile soil"
2.MEDICINE marked by a fluid discharge.

Hello all you creative Steemers,  Johnster here.

A word that gives you the creeps? Really? (let me know yours in the comments.
Some word or sentence that you just can’t stand hearing?
You might have a visceral reaction to it or worse...
Not because the word is overused and/or abused, potty talk or swearing.

A totally innocent word, that’s minding it’s own business doing it’s wordy thing: Moist

A study (http://journals.plos.org/plosone/article?id=10.1371/journal.pone.0153686) in April showed that 10 to 20% of you just cringed or even felt really bad when they hear… moist.
It's called word aversion, the phenomenon when a word itself feels uncomfortable or gross, something you did not want to see, hear, feel, taste, or smell.

The reason for why is not fully understood but there are a lot of  hypotheses.

PLOS one suggested it's a combination of sounds.
It feels wrong when we say or hear them, or even think about them.
“mouth feel” was also mentioned in the study... eh eww, what's that?  

But the results supported a different hypothesis as well:
I think people don’t like the word because of its connotation with sex, genitalia, or bodily functions.

Experiments also showed that the people disliked words with related connotations like damp or wet.
They were OK with moist itself when first primed to think about cake.

Neuroscientist D. Eagleman conducted experiments using fake words and found the sounds of some words were rated as more unpleasant than others.
This might explain why many words with a sexual association like panties are vomit inducing to some, while totally innocent words like crevice, ointment, and fiducial are adverse to others.

Word aversion is fairly unexplored, data gathered is mostly done by simple surveys.
"Moist" scores high on many lists though.
Maybe because so many people just dislike moist.

Are there any weird words you can’t stand hearing?
Let me know in the comments.
_________
There is a difference between knowing your shit and knowing you're shit.
Take care:
Johnster