Word aversion: Hate moist? Slacks? Crevice? Why do people hate words? - Slate Magazine - 39 views
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Zoe Cook on 09 Apr 13I think it is really hard for us to separate words from their meanings and I think that, even unintentionally, we will always have some aversion to words whose meaning we dislike or find "gross". I think it would be really interesting to see a study in which the participants did not speak the target language and then judged how attractive sounding the words were. I think the results would be at least somewhat different than those studies done about English words with English speakers, who cannot fully disassociate the meaning from the word. On the other hand, maybe we give gross sounding names to gross things. Maybe our language reflects our preferences, instead of our preferences unfairly classifying our language.
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