In English, for example, studies have shown that swear words contain ... wind up in curses—which ones soften the sound of a word so that it can’t pack the angry, cathartic power that common ...

Learn some overused words that make you sound boring (and some ... ambivalent means that you don’t care about something. In ...

Oh by the way, have you ever heard of a pangram ... And that’s just one of the reasons why using big words doesn’t make you sound smart. Do you pepper your sentences with the word “literally”?

Then we have the way a word sounds. “The aversion we experience ... that sounds a bit like you're burping. It just doesn't feel — or sound — nice to say. Mucus is definitely in the same ...

They also tend to include the sounds P, T or K, “without giving ... with noses often include the nasal N sound, and words related to smallness often have an “ee” sound (as in “mini ...

This phenomenon, where the sound of a word triggers an emotion ... So hearing a person say they have bought a new lead for their beagle isn’t likely to cause much confusion (buying a lead ...

You might think that using big, fancy words will make you sound smart, but it can actually have the complete opposite ... or like someone who isn’t intelligent enough to understand their audience.

There are lots of words people get wrong. With homophones — words that have the same pronunciation ... or not. There aren’t degrees of uniqueness. People also throw around the word ...