Booty more amusing than ass, according to first in-depth study of the funniness of English words

By Christian Jarrett When I was at primary school, we used to type out the word “BOOBIES” using upside-down digits on our electronic calculators and we thought it was hilarious. This was an all-boys school in the late 80s, cut us some slack. And anyway, maybe we weren’t so daft. The word (although spelt differently as “Booby”) was among the top-three most funny words as identified in a new paper in Behaviour Research, which is the first in-depth investigation of the perceived funniness of individual English words. Among the 5000 words that were studied, Booty was rated the funniest of all, scoring 4.32 on average on a scale from 1 (not funny at all) to 5 (most funny). The lowest scoring word was Rape with an average of 1.18. The researchers Tomas Engelthaler and Thomas Hills at the University of Warwick, England hope their findings will provide a useful resource, a “highly rudimentary ‘fruit fly’ version” of humour” for researchers studying the psychology of what makes us laugh. The 821 participants for the study (average age 35; 58 per cent were female) were recruited via Amazon’s Mechanical Turk online survey website. To ease them into the challenge, they each began by rating 11 “calibrator words” selected from pilot research because they’d attracted a wide range of funniness scores from high (Turd, scored at 3.78 in pilot research) to low (Drought, scored 1.13). After this, each participan...
Source: BPS RESEARCH DIGEST - Category: Psychiatry & Psychology Authors: Tags: Emotion Language Methods Source Type: blogs