If you stubbed your toe right now, what sound would you make?
According to linguists,
the chances are pretty good
that your answer would be surprisingly similar to one given by someone on the other side of the planet,
even if you speak totally different languages.
For Scientific American, I'm Rachel Feltman.
I'm here today with our friend Alison Parshall,
an associate news editor at Scientific American who often covers biology,
health, technology, and physics.
She recently wrote about a study that focused on the words humans use to express pain and the wild similarities between those exclamations around the world.
Allison, thanks for coming on to chat.
Hopefully it won't be too painful.
Ouch.
That's all I have to say.
So why are linguists talking about pain?
Well, linguists are talking about everything, always.
Talking about talking, but linguists are talking.
About pain
because the words that we use to express it might actually tell us something about our shared biology and the evolution of kind of language in general.
It's a pretty big topic.