MOIST. MOIST? MOIST! MOIST. MOIST

MOIST. The month of June has been unusually MOIST in New York. So MOIST outside. Mad MOIST.

If you’re one of those people, you might be curious why you have such a weird natural aversion to the word MOIST. Why does MOIST make you want to curl up inside and die? What did MOIST ever do to you?

A new study (via E! Online) done by researchers at Oberlin College and Trinity University who could’ve been working on something way more important than the physical distress caused by the word MOIST found that MOIST makes people think about sexual body fluids. And that’s why you hate it.

Simple as that: Hearing MOIST makes you think…MOIST.

The study titled “An Exploratory Investigation of Word Aversion” reads:

The results of three experiments represent a novel exploratory effort to better understand the cognitive underpinnings of word aversion. Our results suggest that as many as 20% of the population may be averse to “moist” and that such an aversion is related to age, neuroticism, and a particular kind of disgust: to bodily functions (and not phonological features of the word).

This work reveals that averse words may be similar to well-studied lexical categories like taboo and disgusting words. Our findings contribute to a growing literature on the processing of highly valenced and arousing words.”