When I use a word . . . The funniest medical words

Beautiful words, ugly words, funny words

Some words are beautiful, or are thought to be. They may be phonologically attractive, or they may conjure up beautiful thoughts, or both. When I surveyed a list of 372 words gleaned from lists of supposedly beautiful English words,1 I found that those that were collectively considered to be the most beautiful were aurora, effervescent, elixir, eloquence, ephemeral, epiphany, ethereal, gossamer, halcyon, mellifluous, onomatopoeia, quintessential, serendipity, sonorous, and surreptitious. Eighteen words on the list also had some medical relevance: bibliotherapy, depigmentation, effervescent, eidetic, elixir, embrocation, emollient, euphoria, hallucinate, histamine, kakorrhaphiophobia, lassitude, melancholy, narcissist, nexus, oleander, olfactory, and panacea.

Conversely, some words are ugly, or are thought to be. They may be phonologically unattractive, or they may conjure up unpleasant thoughts, or both. When I surveyed a list of 415 words gleaned from lists of supposedly ugly English words,2 I found that those that were collectively considered to be the most ugly were bulbous, bunion, chunk, crepuscular, moist, ointment, phlegm, pulchritude, pus, quack, regurgitate, scab, and sludge. The medical words that people regarded as ugly were often those that conjure up unpleasant ideas, whatever their phonological properties: anus, bowel, bruise, bunion, buttock, carbuncle, chlamydia, clot, coagulate, corpse, diarrhoea, discharge, expectorate, faeces, flatulence, follicle, genitalia, gestational, haemorrhage, hoarse, honk, meatus, membrane, mucus, nasal, obese, ointment, orifice, placenta, polyp, preggers, pregnant, puberty, pubes, puke, pus, pustule, putrid, queasy, rectum, regurgitate, saliva, scab, secretion, sluice, smegma, sphincter, sputum, syphilis, syringe, vaginal, vomit, wart, wheeze, womb, and zit. Of these, bunion, ointment, phlegm, pus, and scab appeared most often in various lists. “Quack” also featured quite often in the lists, but perhaps evoking ducks rather than docs.

My analyses suggested that there are three types of English words: those that are considered beautiful, those that are considered ugly, and those that are neither.

There are, however, other categories of words that might be considered, funny words for example. Such words cut across the beautiful/ugly divide—a word can be beautiful or ugly or neither, while being at the same time funny. But before considering what makes a word funny, we must first consider what exactly we mean by “funny.”

Funny-ha-ha and funny peculiar

The word “funny,” the adjectival form of “fun,” which may have come from an Early English word, fon, meaning a fool and related to “fond,” has several different meanings, two of which are relevant here.

“Funny” first appeared in English in the early 18th century, meaning “Humorous, comical, fun; causing laughter or amusement.”3 The earliest use recorded in the Oxford English Dictionary (OED) comes from Richard Bayes’s biography of the highwayman Dick Turpin.4 Turpin, accompanied by John Fielder, Joseph Rose, Humphry Walker, William Bush, and Samuel Gregory, together with John Wheeler, met by appointment at the White Hart Inn, at the upper end of Drury Lane on 7 February 1735, intending to rob a farmer, Mr Francis. They accosted him, but he, mistaking their intentions, “not apprehending them to be rogues, but done in a frolick, only said to them, methinks you are mighty funny, gentlemen.” They showed him their pistols, and “swore they would shoot him if he made opposition or disturbance, and seizing him by the arms, led him into the stable to his men, where they bound him.” They then went to his house, held up his daughter and staff, and completed their robbery.

A short time later “funny” also came to mean “Cheerful due to alcohol; slightly drunk, tipsy,” a meaning that the dictionary marks as “now rare.” Then at the end of the 18th century it acquired a new meaning, which the dictionary marks as “colloquial”: “Odd, peculiar, strange; interesting, surprising, unexpected.”

It wasn’t until the start of the 20^th century that anyone thought it helpful to distinguish these two different meanings, amusing and odd, by the terms “funny-ha-ha” and “funny-peculiar.” Both of these attributes mark words that are thought to be “funny.”

What makes a word funny?

Lists of supposedly “funniest” words have been published in many websites56789101112 and a book.13 I have combined the lists and analysed them.

The lists contain, in sum, 1117 items, of which several are included in more than one list or have variant spellings, leaving 708 unique items. Several of those that are duplicated appear in more than two, three, or four lists, suggesting that there may have been some copying across the lists. This impression is enhanced by the fact that those who present their personal lists of supposedly funny words on YouTube videos are clearly not linguistics experts, but would-be entertainers.

Several features emerge from an analysis of the 708 items in the combined list that suggest common features of words that people regard as funny.

● The words tend to be polysyllabic: 88% have two syllables or more, and 23% have four syllables or more. This is similar to my list of beautiful words, 94% of which are polysyllabic, but different from the list of the ugliest words, nearly 30% of which are monosyllabic. Indeed the list of funniest words includes five words that are longer than any words on the other two lists: abibliophobia, batrachomyomachy, hemidemisemiquaver, floccinaucinihilipilification, and supercalifragilisticexpialidocious. The exception to this is kakorrhaphiophobia (a fear of failure), which, surprisingly, is on the beautiful list and not on the funny list.

● The funny words, whether monosyllabic or not, tend to be pronounced with the stress on the first syllable, 75% in all. This is a significantly higher percentage than the beautiful words, 51%, but a significantly lower percentage than the ugly words, 82%, many of which were monosyllabic anyway.

● Certain letters feature more commonly than expected in the funny words:

o The letters /b/, /f/, and /g/ stand out as occurring more frequently as the initial letters of funny words than would be expected from their usual frequencies in English.

o The letter /o/ occurs more often in any position in a word than expected, 9.3% of the time, compared with /e/ which is usually the commonest letter (8.8% in this case); it is particularly noticeable in words ending in –oo, such as ballyhoo, bazoo, buckaroo, chuckaboo, cuckoo, cutesy-poo, flaparoo, furryboo, gardyloo, hullabaloo, rubaboo, tickety-boo, toodle-oo, voodoo, wackadoo, wazoo, and yahoo. And another 93 words (13%) feature a double-o elsewhere in the word, including appaloosa, bootylicious, canoodle, doohickey, firkytoodling, gadzooks, hootenanny, kookaburra, looniness, moonstruck, nincompoop, oopsie-daisy, poodle-doodle, skedoodle, tootle, va-va-voom, whooperup, yooper, and zoom.

o The phoneme <k>, as in the letters /k/ and hard /c/, often considered by comedians to make words funny, occurs in 6.6% of cases, fifth on the list after /o/, /e/, /a/, and /l/. In particular, the combination /ck/ occurs in 65 words, including ackamarackus, bawcock, cockamamie, dilly-whacker, fiddlesticks, gobsmacked, ickle, Jabberwocky, kicky-wicky, lackadaisical, muckraker, poppycock, quackerish, rubberneck, snicker-snee, ticklish, upchuck, wacky, and yuck.

o Letters that start words are often repeated throughout, both vowels, such as /a/ (abracadabra, ackamarackus, alakazam, arfarfan'arf, argy-bargy, and artsy-fartsy) and /o/ (obnoxious, octothorpe, olio, onomatopoeia, and oxymoron), and consonants, such as /b/ (bibble, biblioklept, blabbermouth, blubber, blubberbutt, blubber-buttocks, blubber-nugget, bobbery, bobble, boobs, bubblegum, bumbershoot, and bumblebee) and hard /c/ (cacafuego, cackle, cacophony, catty-corner, cleek, coccyx, cockalorum, cockamamie, cuckold, and cuckoo).

● Henri Bergson observed in his 1900 essay Le rire (Laughter) that “la répétition, l'inversion et linterférence des séries ... sont ceux du vaudeville, et qu’il ne saurait y en avoir d’autres” (“repetition, inversion, and  reciprocal interference of series ... are the methods of light comedy, and no others are possible”).¹⁴ We see combinations of these features in the list, in the form of reduplicative words, of which there are 62 in all, including abracadabra, chockablock, dilly-dally, easy-peasy, fiddle-faddle, ill-willie, jeepers-creepers, kicky-wicky, lickety-lick, mumbo-jumbo, namby-pamby, nit-wit, okey-dokey, piddle-paddle, razzle-dazzle, snicker-snack, teeny-weeny, va-va-voom, willy-nilly, and yoyo. Words beginning with /h/ seem particularly susceptible to this treatment—there are nine of them: hanky-panky, harum-scarum, heebie-jeebies, helter-skelter, higgledy-piggledy, hocus-pocus, hodgepodge, hoity-toity, and holy-moley.

● Some words appear in the list because they evoke topics about which people are likely to snigger, including bodily functions, even when the word has actually nothing to do with them (absquatulate, artsy-fartsy, burp, cacafuego, cacophony, cackle, crapulence, fartlek, gardyloo, poop, poppycock, razzberry, turdiform, and vomitory) and things reminiscent, although not necessarily indicative of, sex (amazeballs, bedswerver, blubber-buttocks, boobs, bootylicious, buggered, bumfuzzle, callipygian, canoodle, cockalorum, cockamamie, dingus, eargasm, fleshmonger, floozy, formication, hanky-panky, ill-willie, knickers, poppycock, pratfall, and wazoo).

● Some words are included simply because they are unfamiliar, often dialect or foreign words or obsolete ones. Examples include bupkis, klutz, and tchotchke, Yiddish words meaning respectively nothing at all, a clumsy person, and a trinket or knick-knack, and the Shakespearean words fustilarian (perhaps the same as fustilugs, a fat, frowzy woman) and kickie-wickie (a wife).

● A few words are listed because they were specifically invented to be humorous. Lewis Carroll’'s chortle, Jabberwocky, Snark, and snicker-snack are good examples, as of course are the filmic inventions Munchkin (from The Wizard of Oz, originally from the book by L Frank Baum) and supercalifragilisticexpialidocious (from Mary Poppins).

Funny medical words

In the lists I’ve surveyed I’ve found the following 13 words, supposedly funny, all of which have some medical connection, however remote: anencephalous, boobs, borborygm, burp, coccyx, dipsomaniac, earlobe, elixir, formication, glabella, itchy, puking, and upchuck. Not as many as I would have expected, but then medicine is a serious business.

A final thought

Some entries in the list seem not a bit funny. What, for example, is “ben” doing there, gleaned from a list of 250, affording varied amusement. Perhaps it was an in-joke.

A clue comes from something that Dorothy Parker wrote in an introduction to a collection of humorous pieces by S J Perelman: “There are those who, in their pride and their innocence, dedicate their careers to writing humorous pieces. Poor dears, the world is stacked against them from the start, for everybody in it has the right to look at their work and say, ‘I don’t think that’s funny’.”15

In many cases, supposedly funny words are more funny-peculiar than funny-ha-ha. In not a few instances, however, the words are neither one nor the other.

Perhaps that also explains the omission from any of the lists I have consulted of the word “humerus.” Isn’t that funny?