Sound allergies

For something that means “hatred of sound”, misophonia is such a pretty word, arriving on the ear like a lightly spiced delicacy. It’s a relatively recent coining, albeit a slightly misleading one. People with misophonia tend not to hate all noise but react to individual sounds that trigger anything from mild agitation to fleeting derangement.

It can be the clicking of a pen, humming, slurping, the rustle of leaves. The sound of chewing — one of the most common forms — opens the vortex for me. And when it’s done over the phone, what flashes through my mind doubles as a reminder that if I were to run a dictatorship, it would not be a benevolent one.

But what about those who suffer a mental allergy to the sounds of particular words? You get nothing so shapely as misophonia, just the no-frills word aversion.

There has long been a widespread horror aroused by the word moist, but it has always been something attached in my mind to happy things, such as cakes, frogs and love.

What sets me off — and I have no explanation for this — is a random bag of words that includes panties and snack. Even just typing them releases their sound in my brain, setting off a shudder.

But the worst of all is meal. Again, I cannot explain my visceral hatred of this detestable, seeping mouth sore of a word. I once confessed this to Mark Colvin, who in turn confessed the word tasty did it for him.

He pointed me to an article about word aversion and there I found a sentence that could have emerged from the depths of my soul: “The word ‘meal’ makes me wince. Doubly so when paired with ‘hot’.”

Then I read some people cannot abide cornucopia, and bafflement descended.