Three Roads Blog

A lot of people have problems with the word moist. I’m not a fan, although it doesn’t elicit nausea like the word sofa does. (Don’t ask me why.)

But moistest—that’s a pretty beastly word, one that should never be used to describe food, particularly if the objective is entice someone to eat it.

What’s wrong with moist? For one thing, it sounds like some other unfortunate words: soil (as in, “I soiled my slacks”), ointment, boil (I’m thinking skin ailment), toil, oink, and roil (“This discussion has my stomach roiling”) just to name a few.

The problem is lack of alternatives. Damp leaves a lot to be desired and it isn’t always as accurate as moist, and there’s issue of the negative connotations.

Here are some others, none of which is much better, particularly when used to describe cake:

• Humid
• Soggy
• Clammy

Humid is weird. Soggy is gross. Clammy is just silly.

In a perfect world we’d have gender-neutral pronoun and a positive word to describe a cake that is not dry.