Moist cake...
Moist air...
Moist... ARGH.
It's just a horrible, horrible word, isn't it?
'Moist'... YUK.
Here's a question though - why is that?
Luckily a psychologist has found time to work this out. Dr. Paul Thibodeau, a professor of psychology at Oberlin College in the States, conducted five experiments over four years – including a whopping 2,500 people – all to discover why it is we have negative feelings towards this odious word (sorry, this 'word').
Thibodeau's hypothesis set forth that there were three possible reasons:
1.) It sounds gross
2.) It has gross connotations
3.) People think it's gross and tell everyone they think this, making everyone else think it's pretty darn gross too.
The results of this experiment, published in PLOS ONE, revealed it is generally a mixture of 2.) and 3.) that turn people off. In that, people often associate 'moist' with such substances as 'phelgm' and 'vomit', and whilst other people's opinions didn't help its popularity (3.) this was largely because of the word's association with the aforementioned bodily fluids.
Yes, gross.
In ThePsychReport, Thibodeau commented:
'Disgust is adaptive. If we didn’t have an instinct to run away from vomit and diarrhea, disease would spread more easily. But is this instinct biological or do we learn it?...
'Significant work is needed to answer it definitively. But the present studies suggest that, when it comes to the disgust that is elicited by words like "moist", there is an important cultural component — the symbols we use to communicate with one another can become contaminated and elicit disgust by virtue of their association with bodily functions.'
So there you have it, why you can't stand the word 'moist'.
Now, let us wash our hands of it (not literally though, because, you know, they'll end up getting mois... BAAAAH!).