Words that Make You Squirm: Writers and Word Aversion

by Carla Douglas

@CarlaJDouglas

Image by arneheijenga (CC BY-NC-SA 2.0)

Writers: carefully prune your descriptive passages, or you risk striking an “ick” nerve with readers who experience word aversion.

For most of my life I have hated the word tender, and I have a clear memory of when my aversion began. My older sister told me one day – we were probably watching a TV commercial for some food or other – that she hated the word tender, in fact it made her feel sick. It was soft, weak, injured, damaged, sensitive, gross.

It didn’t take much to persuade me to hate it too – I’m susceptible to the power of suggestion and I instantly felt all those things too about the word tender. Yuck. Fast forward probably 40 years and my own daughter says to me, out of the blue: “Do you know what word I hate? Moist.” [She shudders and writhes.] “It’s disgusting.” While I don’t mind the word moist, I understand my daughter’s discomfort with it. It’s a little like tender, isn’t it? In fact, some foods are advertised to be “moist and tender.” Eww.

How many people have a personal list of “ick” words? My guess was that while we might be a bit odd, we were probably not alone. Imagine my surprise, then, to read an article in Slate this spring which identifies word aversion as a real and observable phenomenon. Not only that–Slate flags the word moist as being among the top words people have an aversion to! How delicious! (Well, obviously not to some.)

Slate explains that although some typically icky words, like pus, mucous and phlegm, are on many people’s list of repulsive words, these bodily function-type words don’t necessarily define or describe the category. Other more neutral words also make people’s lists: meal (especially hot meal), crud, cornucopia, fudge, slacks and … luggage. You can read more about how word aversion is defined and other words that make the list in this article from the blog Language Log.

To be sure, Slate continues, advertisers and marketers are well aware of some words’ potential to make the audience squirm, and that sometimes they get this wrong. What about writers? The article surmises that writers don’t seem to suffer this affliction in large numbers. Many writers, it’s known, dislike some words for various reasons – they are pompous, pretentious, overused, or affected (the words, not the writers) – but these kinds of words lack the ick and squirm factor of words in the moist category.

What is my point? (I can hear you asking this.) Writers spend a lot of time thinking about words and language. So many decisions to make: this word or that word? Why this one and not that one? Some writers have favourite words, although they may not know it, and a good editor will alert a writer to her potential overuse of these. Some writers get carried away and write overly descriptive prose, pulling into service all the best words they can find.

Perhaps writers could spend a little more time thinking about the words they use and the associations readers may have with them. This is not to say that they should choose words based on what they think readers will approve – that’s a subject for another day. However, it is worth stopping to consider the effects of the sounds of the words and language you choose, because it offers another way to think about audience.

We can get so caught up in the sound of our own voice. It pays to step outside that bubble from time to time and try to listen with another’s ears.

Related Posts

Free Editing Options for Self-Pubs
Two Ways to Improve Your Writing Before You Begin
Use Google's Ngram Viewer to Craft Authentic Fiction
Five Reasons Readers will Bail on a Book