The human race has a strange relationship with the word moist.
After all, there are plenty of things that are better when moist: cakes and football pitches, to name just a couple of examples.
Nevertheless, the word moist gets an awfully hard time. Some years ago, readers of the New Yorker voted en masse that if one word were to be removed from the English language – it should be ‘moist’.
To prove our point, imagine looking straight into your mother’s eyes and saying the worst ‘moist’, really lingering on the vowel sound. Disgusted? Exactly.
But why do we have such a distaste for the word ‘moist’? Well, scientists think that they’ve solved the mystery.
Dr. Paul Thibodaut ran five experiments over four years with over 2,500 participants and found that most people dislike the word moist thanks to its connotations – those connotations being a relationship with various effluvia: that is to say things like bodily discharges, mucus, phlegm, sputum, and so on.
This was based on Thibodaut’s findings that people were similarly disgusted by words like ‘foist’ and ‘rejoiced’.
Speaking to Slate, professor of linguistics Jason Riggle explained that words like ‘moist’: “evoke nausea and disgust rather than, say, annoyance or moral outrage. And the disgust response is triggered because the word evokes a highly specific and somewhat unusual association with imagery or a scenario that people would typically find disgusting.”
So there you have it, we don’t hate the word moist for how it sounds but because we can’t hear it without thinking of bodily fluids.
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