If It Makes You Happy

I have a love/hate relationship with facebook. I think that it's fantastic for keeping in touch with people who live far away and sharing photos and such, but I can't stand all the "click like if.." and drama that comes along with it. One of the things I do like however, is that my son shares fascinating articles that he reads on the internet through his page. He has a job doing some sort of web thing that involves him sitting at his computer for hours on end, and while he is there, he uses his second monitor for other non-job related things like chatting with his friends and keeping up with his news feeds.

Last week he shared an article from Mental_floss.com about the happiest sounding words in the English language. It was an interesting article, based of a study that the University of Vermont did last year, which had at least a half dozen variants of the world laugh in the top 20. Mental_floss went through the list and picked out their top 25 favorites and shared the list and I found the whole thing a great read. Of course, I shared it on my facebook page along with the quip, "I'm not sure I can stand behind a list that doesn't include the word 'snow-day', but this is a great article!".

Then I got to thinking about it, and I haven't stopped since. What you think are the 25 happiest sounding words in the English language are surely going to differ from what I think are the 25 happiest sounding words. There are a lot of variables here to consider. How old a person is, their life experiences, gender, current mental state, if they have children or even like children and if they are employed. I'm sure there are a lot more variables I could come up with if I thought longer about it, but those are the most obvious ones I could think of.

In any case, I give to you 25 words in the English language that I think are happy sounding, in no particular order:

gentle, cozy, beautiful, snuggle, bountiful, sunlight, radiate, whistle, giggle, balmy, restful, forgiveness, stillness, gratitude, manifesto(because isn't that such a fun word?), warmth, vacation, cupcake, hope, glimpse, kisses, rolling (thunder, down a hill, in the hay), nestle, flourish, and praise.