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Dec 10, 2023

Why flange and quingle are such funny words according to science

Feedback is our weekly column of bizarre stories, implausible advertising

Feedback is our weekly column of bizarre stories, implausible advertising claims, confusing instructions and more

25 November 2020

Josie Ford

Reflecting recently on the overzealous censorship of the proceedings of a scientific conference by a prudish AI, we called for professional help to establish what it is about the sound of words like "flange" that makes them ripe for double entendre (7 November).

Cometh the hour, cometh the man: psycholinguist Chris Westbury at the University of Alberta in Canada, co-author of such papers as "Telling the world's least funny jokes: On the quantification of humor as entropy" and "Wriggly, squiffy, lummox, and boobs: What makes some words funny?".

His central thesis, tested first on made-up words, is that a word's intrinsic amusement factor is related to the improbability of its character combination, which can be measured in terms of the word's contribution to the overall disorder, or entropy, of the English language. Broadly, words containing less common sounds are rated as funnier. Proffic, quingle, probble – clearly funny. Chertin, screnta, clester – not so much.

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Feedback finds this explanation entirely quixulubble, but what of the rudeness factors of real words? Here, Westbury's work has enabled many valuable insights. Words containing an "oo" sound, for example, are disproportionately likely to be rated as funny and also to have or to acquire – cause and effect being not so readily disentangled here – questionable connotations. Well, screw our fruity bloomers.

To circle back, perhaps unwisely, to our starting point, "flange" is only mildly funny measured by its phonetic qualities, barely scraping into the top quarter of all English words, by Westbury's calculations. Some additional thesis is required to account for its phnarf factor – perhaps the other words whose company it regularly keeps, we speculate?

Westbury thinks not. "I have been asked the same thing several times about the word ‘moist’, which apparently many people find rude," he says. "Although its sexual connotations are obvious, by far the most common neighbours had to do with cake."

To humo(u)r us, though, Westbury ran "flange" through his semantic relations widget, coming up with the following list: flanges, crossmember, flanged, ferrule, mounting flange, splined, rubber grommet, piston rod, mounting flanges, tensioner. Goodness gracious, and all that in a family magazine.

The basic problem of computer prudery is, Feedback recalls, known in the trade as the Scunthorpe problem. It is named after the town in Lincolnshire, UK, residents of which have, from time to time, found themselves cut off from online services for fear of upsetting the morals of the wider world.

Many thanks for sending in your own examples, although we suspect many of these primarily serve your own titillation at writing rude-sounding words.

For pure silliness, we commend Geoff Vaughan and his email subject line "Nuclear security", auto-corrected to "Nuclebottomcurity", as well as Rod Ward for his story of a police choir's conductor stymied in sending material for a Christmas carol concert. The problem? Ding Dong Merrily on High.

We draw breath with a headline spotted by Jane Fisher on Australia's ABC News website on 2 November: "Face wearing in Victoria will be part of life for the foreseeable future."

A frisson of delight ripples through our inbox as many of you, your attention no doubt drawn by the recent focus on Philadelphia's extended presidential ballot-counting process, point to the city's police commissioner, Danielle Outlaw, who has occasionally frequented this page.

We have a warm, fuzzy glow, meanwhile, thanks to the unexpected news that the outgoing Trump administration's appointee as director of the next National Climate Assessment is not only an experienced climate scientist, but also believes in the reality of anthropogenic global warming. Indeed, Betsy Weatherhead seems admirably qualified in every way.

Staying in the City of Sisterly Love, as it has been re-nicknamed in honour of the 100th anniversary of the 19th Amendment to the US constitution, Trump campaign lawyer Jerome Marcus was pressed on his claim that campaign representatives weren't being allowed into the city's election count. Asked by judge Paul Diamond whether any observers were already there from the campaign, Marcus replied: "There's a non-zero number of people in the room."

It is an answer that Feedback can just about justify if some of those present were lawyers whose tiresome arguments were sucking life out of the room, effectively creating a non-zero, negative number of people.

Simultaneously – and, we can only assume, coincidentally – our attention is drawn to an advert for Always Platinum sanitary towels, claiming "up to zero leaks, up to zero odours and up to zero bunching". Quite what their suboptimal performance amounts to, we would rather not speculate.

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