Les Jones

Word of the Day > Word of the Day - Ohrwurm

Bob Krumm writes:

For the last two days, my daughter has been singing "How Do You Solve a Problem Like Maria?" from the musical The Sound of Music. Apparently she has to sing this song at a school event.

So how do I solve the problem of having this annoying song stuck in my head as I'm about to go off to work?

Ohrwurm- A song or tune that repeats over and over inside a person's head. (Definition from Word Spy.)

The Germans use the word Ohrwurm (rhymes with "door worm," where the "w" is pronounced like a "v") to denote these cognitively infectious musical agents. Whenever somebody complains to you that he just can't keep the latest pop tune from running through his head, tell him he can dispel it by calling it by name and by thinking about the original German meaning, which captures some of the mnemonicalli parasitical connotations of the word, for Ohrwurm literally means "ear worm" and is also used to refer to a kind of worm that can crawl into the ear. —Howard Rheingold, "Untranslatable words," The Whole Earth Review, December 22, 1987

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