Gramer Girl here, I'm Mignon Foggedy and you can think of me as your friendly guide to

the English language, writing, history, rules, and cool stuff.

Today, I have some cool stuff because I'm going to talk with Jade Wu about words that

cause people to have negative, physical reactions.

Jade is the host of the Savvy Psychologist Podcast at Quick and Dirty Tips and I thought

she'd be perfect to give us some insight on why people can have such strong feelings

about words.

Hi, Jade. It's good to talk to you today.

Good to talk to you. I'm so glad to be here.

Yeah, you bet. So, when we first talked about doing a show about words that bother people,

like physically bother them, we thought it might be something called misfonia, which means

hated sound. But then you told me it was actually called word aversion. So, what's the

difference between those two things?

Yeah, that's a great question. I actually thought those were the same thing too until

I really looked into it. So, misfonia is when someone has a major averse of reaction

to sounds. Usually bodily sounds like chewing, foot tapping, sometimes, sometimes the voices,

usually nasally voices. And people can have this aversion to specific people making those

noises. And usually the reaction is one of anger and people even say that it's like a

rage kind of feeling. Whereas for word aversion, it's specifically words that people are

averse to whether it's even just seeing the word or hearing the word said, often people

say, I can't even bring myself to say this word. And it's more of like a physical visceral

disgust reaction rather than an anger reaction. Wow. That makes sense as a difference between

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