Some people hate this word. Recently, JEFritz listed it as a Word That Needs to Go Away. Now, I agree about the invented and redundant word "ginormous," and I agree that "special" has lost all meaning due to over-use.
But MOIST? I must disagree.
Apparently people get a creepy feeling from this word because of its application to dank, dark, musty, mold-encrusted spaces. Hidden grottoes, perhaps, where the smell of algae and moss hangs thick in the air. Let me throw some more description on that -- humid, stale air pressing on your sweat-pricked skin, suffocating as a moist wool blanket.
OK, that's just "summertime" where I live, but... we're way beyond the implications of one little word like MOIST. So you want to get rid of MOIST? Okay.
But consider the loss:
This chocolate cake is moist and delicious.
will become... what?
Sad cake is sad. |
This chocolate cake is damp and delicious.
Damp cake?
This chocolate cake is humid and delicious.
This chocolate cake is wet. Poor thing. It could have been moist.
I threw the dank, musty chocolate cake in the trash and mourned the loss.
English is a wonderful language. Few of our words have only one use, and we're inventing more all the time. And if you don't like a word, you can just avoid it. Or can you?
6 comments:
A couple of years ago a rather famous mommy blogger complained about "moist." Shortly thereafter I began to run into more and more people complaining about the word. I blame her for starting this upsetting trend.
All words have a time and place, I think, even "ginormous" and "special." I refuse to eat humid cake. (But I will take a ginormous piece of moist cake.)
Elizabeth Twist: Writer, Plague Enthusiast
I don't see a problem with moist. Depends what it refers to. In cookery books, fine. In romance novels, not so much.
mood
Moody Writing
@mooderino
The Funnily Enough
I think "special" can recover if given some time off -- I think "awesome" is starting to heal from its massive over-use in my teenage years...
"Ginormous", well, in dialogue it sure will tell you a lot about the character.
Terry Pratchett has a character named Moist, and he is awesome.
Hey, I didn't come up with the moist thing. I actually found it online and realized hmm. It is sort of gross. Bad connotations I guess.
It's not just you. It's one of those things that seems to crop up every so often.
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