It is time to reclaim the English language’s most despised term

Shh! There is a word that some refuse to utter

It’s not often I start with a warning but here goes. The following column refers to a word that is despised by one in five people, makes many feel disgusted and was recently placed on a banned list at a boys’ school.

The word is, moist. There, I said it. Half the readers may now decide to flick to the next story in the hope that the churning feeling in their stomach will subside when they encounter more acceptable words like war, conflict, murder, rape and genocide.

For the remaining wordsmiths I would like to defend a word that, in the space of one generation, has been shifted from the banners of cake mixes on to the list of words most people would like banned.

Obviously, a lot of the angst around this word comes from the association with genitalia. But that association alone does not explain why the word can’t be used in other contexts (food, weather, crying eyes), nor does it explain the visceral reaction. So obnoxious has this word become that the word itself, not any of its meanings, has become unhearable (and, yes, I’m going to play around with made-up words).

According to linguists, the word belongs in a long list of unappealing words like festering, phlegm, fecund, viscous, curd, slurp, pulp, yolk, gurgle, smear, squirt, lugubrious and rural. Rural? Really? Except for the last one, most of those words refer to things that can only be disgusting or they belong to what are referred to as “phonetically abrasive” letters b, g, m, u and o. (Gumbo must send people crazy).

But none of those yuck words have quite the same revulsion as our guest word (note, I am trying to avoid too much use of the word) and even words that are one letter removed from it, hoist and foist, don’t invoke the wrath of listeners.

This is especially so with younger people and therein lies a clue. People over 60 years old grew up with the White Wings version of moist whereas younger people have grown up with more sexually explicit media in their lives but not so much cake making. (By the way, one publication listed words that could be used to describe a successful cake, including not dry, good crumb, spongy and hydrated, which only proves that moist is the perfect word for the description).

Among younger people there is an element of panic, so much so that innocent name sayers are told never to use the word, never even think the word and, please, don’t write about it. Could this word sensitivity be a sign of a broader fragility?

The last time society felt faint at the mention of words that might excite animal spirits was during Victorian England. Remember their aversion to the word, leg, that led to tables having limbs. Or trousers being referred to as inexpressibles; breasts becoming bubbies and prostitutes dancers.

We once laughed at their bustles, bonnets and baleful lexicon but today we have our own collection of words that were once workhorses but are now alarm bells – fat, old, normal, homeless, crazy, minority, hysterical, grandfather (as in clause), preferred (as in pronoun) and spirit animal (although I think animal spirits is still OK, especially in an economic text).

If there is one consolation for those caught in the White Wings lexicon, it is that researchers have found that lovers of language (I think lovers is still OK) are the least likely to be offended by the word.

And, if you’ve got this far, you can count yourself among them.

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