![]() It has a big name to match that big feeling: transient lingual papillitis. One tiny, swollen taste bud looks like no big deal in the mirror, but feels distractingly humongous in your mouth. That callus on your foot may be soft, in which case it’s a heloma molle. If you ever feel the sudden flutter under your skin from a small bundle of muscle fibers spontaneously contracting, you can say you’re experiencing fasciculation (from fasciculus, “little bundle”). Say this term for an ice cream headache five times fast to warm up your mouth and relieve the brain freeze. It is followed by a pricking, tingling sensation called paresthesia. That numb feeling that you wake to when you’ve slept on your arm wrong is obdormition. Give your complaints some interesting heft with these fancy medical terms for commonplace problems. If that rustling in nearby bushes, turned out to be a rabbit instead of a sabre-toothed tiger, laughter could alert others to the innocuous critter, Kaplan writes.Īs psychologist Peter McGraw told Joel Warner for Wired, a laugh is a “signal to the world that a violation is indeed OK.Your health issues might be mundane, but that’s no reason to be boring. It’s possible that our ancestors evolved to think things were funny to show when surprises aren't threats. ![]() Using this idea, Westbury has devised a mathematical model to explain humor, reports Kaplan. So when a word diverges greatly from what sounds like a real word, people more often find the nonsense word funny. This isn't a new idea: The 19th century German philosopher Arthur Schopenhauer proposed the "incongruity theory," which suggests that the basis of humor lies in violated expectations, like when a parade of clowns gets out of a tiny car, writes Kaplan. … Emotion is helping us compute the probabilities in the world." "And we’re showing that feeling is actually a kind of probability calculation. "They’re going on their gut feeling, going 'It feels funny to me,'" Westbury says in the video. As it turns out, there’s a kind of “Goldilocks Zone” of nonsense words: A word like “anotain” got fewer laughs because it looks more like a real word, while “pranomp” got more because it looks just silly enough, David Shariatmadari writes for The Guardian. Westbury and his colleagues discovered that the more unusual a word looks or sounds, the funnier it is. “But there’s actually a consistent relationship between how funny they are and how weird they are.” “Some non-words are funny, and they’re weird when they are,” Westbury says in a video produced by the University of Alberta. So Westbury and a group of linguists from the University of Tübingen in Germany came up with a list of nonsense words to see which ones got the biggest laughs. ![]() ![]() But Westbury found that every time his subjects saw the word “snunkoople” they cracked up, Sarah Kaplan reports for the Washington Post. He was initially conducting a study to see whether people with a speech and language disorder called aphasia could distinguish between real and fake words. According to a new study published in the Journal of Memory and Language, there’s a scientific reason why made-up words like these might get you to chuckle.Ĭhris Westbury, a psychology professor at the University of Alberta, didn’t set out to study what makes people laugh at nonsense words worthy of Dr. ![]() But if you think they look or sound funny, you’re not alone. These are all nonsense words generated by a computer. Does the word “quingel” make you giggle? How about “finglam? Or “rembrob?” Don’t worry about reaching for the dictionary. ![]()
0 Comments
Leave a Reply. |