Letters to the Editor
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How to really upset Katie Couric.
"Moist sputum."
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No problem with "moist," but I hate the word "panties."
As a woman, I've never felt weird about the word "moist." it frankly makes me think of delicious chocolate cake. I can't imagine complaining to a prof. for using the word.
I do, however, HATE the word "panties." It does sound childish and I prefer the word "underpants," which I think is funny without making me feel my undergarments belong to a toddler. I don't jump all over anybody for using it though.
The only other word in wide circulation I hate is "tit." It makes me feel like a cow or something.
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Cracked, flaky argument
Interesting discussion of kinaesthenia (the association of words, colors, numbers, etc. with unusual sensory stimuli) without ever mentioning the term. Musicians, in particular, are often known to mentally compose in colors, rather than notes.
But the important question: does this mean that "moisturizer," apparently the second-best selling woman's product, is a dead commodity?
As for approved terminology, Victorianism and Feminism were going hand in hand long before it was PC to come out. Check "The Language Police" by Diane Ravitch.
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How about 'fungal'
I guess that's pretty gross too.
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No real news today, eh?
The words that bother me are torture, rape, war, segregation, separatism and overincarceration.
"Moist" doesn't bother me, but "dry" bothers me, because it implies a drought, and drought is about the scariest word of all.
Moist is a good word because it sounds like what it means.
Although I must confess there was a brief period when I didn't like it at all. That was when we discovered toxic mold behind the fridge.
I got over my aversion to "moist" when we had the damage fixed. Then I discovered another word I can't stand: "drywaller."
As in "The drywaller hammered a nail into an electrical wire and shorted out the whole kitchen, but refuses to tear down the drywall he just put up so an electrician can look underneath, because he insists he didn't touch any wires and the electrical problem was really caused by something else in another room that's not even on the same circuit."
When I hear the word "drywaller," I feel like screaming "Tear down the wall," and I'm not thinking about Pink Floyd.
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Panties?!?
How can the word panties possibly be offensive? Moist, I can almost understand -- not in its entirety, so the references to repression are lost on me, but the "oi" sound, when in the middle of a word, should only come out of Jim Carrey's mouth when in "Dumb and Dumber" mode. It doesn't exactly repulse me, but... well, maybe it does, because every word I can think of with that grating sound in the middle is now running through my head and I may very well be sick. But moist? The whole word? I tend towards full-on wetness myself, and don't bake much, so I've little occasion to use it and less to despise it.
But panties? What could possibly be wrong with the word "panties"? My three year old daughter and I sing praise to our panties -- and, to be honest, Daddy's panties, because everyone wears panties! -- almost every day. I'm female, she's female, we love panties! And goose pimples! And cornucopias... or at least she will as soon as I teach her to say the word!
In all honesty, I've found only one word repugnant in my life, and have a few friends who feel the same, and that's the word "twat". Is there a word that better reduces a woman to her genitalia, and not in a grudging-respect kind of way (pussy, cunt), but in a "women are vapid and passive" way? Say it slow. Ugh.
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Connotations
All words have meanings beyond their basic dictionary definitions:
34 Moby Thesaurus words for "moist":
boggy, clammy, damp, dampish, dank, dewy, drippy, drizzly, fenny, foggy, gooey, humid, lachrymose, marshy, maudlin, misty, muggy, mushy, rainy, roric, roriferous, sappy, slushy, soggy, soupy, steamy, sticky, swampy, tacky, tearful, teary, undried, wet, wettish
This is a feature, not a bug. Words with negative connotations - or sexual connotations - are not offensive, and we shouldn't let them become so. But we should keep the connotations, and let them change with time, because they enrich our language. Is it because vaginas get wet that so many of these wet words have negative connotations? Probably not. Probably it's because it sucks to get caught out in the rain. But it does say something about us when we hate on a perfectly good word like moist on a sexual basis.
Although maybe we should hate on moist when it's in a sexual context. If the vaginas involved in your sex are merely moist instead of sopping, dripping, or wet, you've got other problems.
A friend of mine likes to ask, "absent any other context, which word is worse: used or moist?"
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Smell my beard.
Ooh! How about a contest!
What's the most offensive phrase or sentence in English that contains no explicit profanity (none of the seven words you can't use in a broadcast) or scatalogical reference.
"Moist sputum" is pretty good. The most disgusting phrase/sentence I can think of is the title of a Frank Zappa song:
Smell my beard.
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Strange
It all strikes me as very repressed. You almost want to assume that everyone who is bugged out by these words dislikes sex.
BTW – I know a woman who runs an exotic bakery called ‘Moist and Tasty.’ It always made me laugh.
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If you're easily grossed out by moisture
Do not watch the World Series in HD. You can see every little thing that comes out of those boys' mouths, or tries to come out but gets sucked back in.
You can tell whether their sputum diffuses into a fine spray or travels as a single undulating projectile, perhaps even landing on the shirt sleeve the batter is about to use to wipe his sweaty face.
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Research potential!
Is it lexical disgust or phonetic disgust? In other words, is it the sound of the word or its connotations? Get together a group of anti-moist people and expose them to a variety of words in languages they don't understand, some of which contain this phoneme combination. Does the word moist have the same connotations in every dialect of English? If not, do a study on moist-aversion among speakers of dialects where it doesn't have the same connotations. Is it pronounced with the exact same dipthong in every dialect? If not, see if there's variance in moist-aversion depending on pronunciation.