In his new book, Musicophilia, Oliver Sacks seems to have created a new word for those sticky songs that you can't get out of your head. In German, these things are called ohrwurms, their word for earwigs. This has come into English as earworm. Now Sacks has decided that he prefers brainworm. You can watch a video of him talking about it on the book's page on Amazon.com.
John Terauds, writing in the Toronto Star on the weekend, used Sacks's new word, but now says via e-mail that it was a brain fart.
No comments:
Post a Comment