Monday, August 7, 2017

Brits and Twits


Some words just sound funny, and sometimes sounds are just more important than semantics.

Booty, booby and nitwit—academics reveal funniest words
Aug 2017, phys.org

Tomas Engelthaler and Professor Thomas Hills in the Department of Psychology analysed 5000 randomly selected words, and showed them to over 800 people online - asking them to rate from one to five how humourous they found each word.

The funniest words - those which had been scored highly by the most people, and given the highest mean humour rating - were (in order):

Booty
Tit
Booby
Hooter
Nitwit
Twit
Waddle
Tinkle
Bebop
Egghead
Ass
Twerp

-phys.org

I have a feeling the sample pool here is from England not the US. Something about 'twit'.

Post Script
Sound Symbolism and Universal Language
Limbic Signal 2017

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