So What's Going on Here?

The pharmaceutical industry is fond of taking conditions that were once considered a normal (if annoying) part of life and encouraging the use of their clinical names. Why? Probably because the use of "medicalese" results in people perceiving a condition as more serious and rare, which in turn leads to a shitload more frightened potential drug buyers. That's right: All you have to do is start calling male pattern baldness "androgenic alopecia," and all of a sudden people will be clamoring to run marathons for it.

But this psychological effect also works the other way around: Some diseases currently don't sound serious enough to our easily manipulated brains. For example, there's an initiative being pushed by the Rheumatoid Patient Foundation to rename rheumatoid arthritis, because they claim that calling a systemic autoimmune condition "arthritis" hampers research funding and insurance coverage. So, your medical condition getting insurance coverage might be seriously affected by the stupid name someone gave it in the past. Here's an idea: Let's just start calling all diseases "-rot" (joint rot, brain rot, dick rot, etc.). That way, they all sound equally serious and insurance companies will have no language-influenced reason to deny coverage for treatment.

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And speaking of treatment, have you ever noticed how pharmaceutical companies regularly throw ridiculous wads of cash at a consultant to come up with names for their pills, yet new drug names all end up sounding the same? It's as if said highfalutin consultant laced his dog's food with Scrabble tiles (with an extra dash of Xs and Zs) and jotted down whatever Rover shat out. Prozac, Lexapro, Paxil, Zoloft, Luvox ...

That's because, for a bunch of wacky historical reasons, the letters X and Z have become associated with technology and innovation -- stick one or both of them in a drug name, and you have something that just screams "SCIENCE!" On the other hand, the magic of sounds can also make your drug appear gentle and non-threatening. For example, Prozac -- all efficient-sounding and full of plosives (consonant sounds like k and p that produce a short burst of sound, like little mouth-explosions) -- was also marketed as the premenstrual aid Sarafem, which manages to bring to mind a common female name, "femme," and angels, all at once. This is why that consultant we mentioned can afford the expensive brand of dog food, people.

Have you ever wondered why marketers advertise breakfast cereal as "crunchy," even though crunchiness is pretty much inherent to the concept of breakfast cereal? Seriously, if the new cereal you just came up with is, like, chewy or something, it may be time to re-examine your career choice as a breakfast cereal development specialist.

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Well, it turns out that's actually a form of marketing known as meaningless differentiation. The words don't convey any information, but their presence flips a switch deep in your brain.

So What's Going on Here?

According to a study published in the Journal of Marketing Research, meaningless differentiation occurs when somebody tries to sell you something based on a "special feature" that is really just some random word they pulled out of their ass. For example, the researchers discuss a company that sold "flaked" instant coffee. It turns out that the shape of an instant coffee grain has absolutely zero effect on the drink itself -- instant coffee dissolves, so its shape is purely aesthetic. It could be shaped like a giant turd and it'd still taste like instant coffee (which, incidentally, tastes like a giant turd). That extra, totally random adjective makes you want it. Here, we'll let Don Draper explain why Lucky Strikes tout "toasted" tobacco.

In one study, researchers tested participants with two different kinds of jackets, one that had normal jacket filling, and one that had "alpine class fill" (which, you'll notice, means precisely nothing). They found that when people were confronted with two identical products, they were far more inclined to choose the one with an added (meaningless) attribute. And here's the kicker: Even after being told that the feature was meaningless and that they had been force-fed a heaping load of horseshit, people still found it impossible to lose their stronger attraction to the meaninglessly differentiated product.

Suddenly, infomercials make a whole lot more sense.

Pop quiz time, monolinguists! Of the two Mandarin words "qing" and "zhong," one means "light" and the other means "heavy." Which do you think is which?

If you guessed that "qing" means "light," you're not alone. English speakers are far more likely to guess this, and guess what? We're correct! We're all some kind of secret linguistic savants! Or really lucky guessers, maybe!

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So What's Going on Here?

For some reason, "front" vowels made with the tongue forward in the mouth (i and e) bring to mind "small, fast, or sharp" things, while vowels made with the tongue further back in the mouth (o, a, and u) make us think of "larger, heavier" things. And this applies not only across languages, but also to made-up words: In a study where researchers pulled some brand names straight out of their asses, participants assigned names containing front vowels to objects like small cars and knives, while they preferred back vowels for objects like Thor hammers and SUVs. In other words, guys, be sure to consult at least one linguistics expert before naming your penis.

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This effect is so strong that it overpowers things you'd think we would have pretty much grasped by adulthood, like, you know, counting to 10. "Six" has the double whammy of a sissy non-plosive sound at the beginning and a puny-sounding front vowel, while "two" has a badass face-punch plosive followed by a powerful back vowel. So subjects who were told to mentally repeat the prices $7.66 and $7.22 for a scoop of ice cream (Starbucks serves ice cream now?) ended up rating $7.66 as the better value, simply because the larger numbers at the end sound so teeny-tiny.

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This "vowel size" effect applies not only to size, but also to gender. Researchers have found that larger vowels are associated more with masculinity, whereas smaller ones are associated more with femininity. For example, the "a" in "Brad" is a deep, masculine sound, whereas the "e" and "i" in "Angelina" are more feminine. The research found that boys were one and a half times more likely to have a large vowel sound in their name than girls, and also that, paradoxically, boys named "Sue" were 100 percent more likely to grow up to be badasses. And if you want to target a product toward dudes, you want those back-vowel sounds -- Axe, Maxim, Xbox, Dodge Ram, etc.

But when it comes to how a person's name can manipulate the brains of others, there is something else to consider ...

So What's Going on Here?

When career website TheLadders took a closer look at the names of their over 5 million members, they found some interesting patterns: Firstly, they discovered that people with popular names (taken from a list of the site's top 25 names) were earning, on average, nearly $7,000 more than the rest of us. Secondly, they found that shorter names equaled larger paychecks -- in fact, they found that every time you add a letter to your kid's name, you drop his or her future salary by about $3,600. And ... we just kicked off a trend of people naming their kids A, B, or C, didn't we?

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Unfortunately, it's not just how short your name is that affects your job prospects. You're also going to need yourself an Anglo-Saxon name in order to get an interview, which is about 100 percent as depressing as it sounds. Researchers from the University of British Columbia found that people with English names had a 40 percent higher chance of landing a job interview than those with "foreign" names (foreign to white people, that is, which is the best kind of foreign).

Sending out 6,000 resumes, researcher Philip Oreopoulos -- obviously no stranger to weird-sounding names -- found that when an applicant wrote down an English name, he was more likely to land a job interview from a white employer than somebody with a Chinese or Indian name with the same qualifications. Keep in mind, this was just based on the name -- the applicant's family might have been in the country for five generations for all the interviewer knew. They just instinctively avoided the name that "sounded" foreign.

So What's Going on Here?

Since the FDA doesn't approve food labels, marketers are free to get pretty creative when naming their products. That "organic lentil cola" you're drinking? It could be made from poached pig shitters and the shattered hopes and dreams of orphans, for all you know. They can also plaster the words "natural" and "healthy" in bright, bold fonts all over the label -- since, from a certain perspective, that's true -- and as long as the ingredients and nutrition facts are also on there (in small print, of course), they'll probably stay in the clear right up until someone chokes on a piece of pork perineum.

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And speaking of ingredients, it turns out that they get renamed all the time. Perhaps the sweetest example of such shenanigans is the time when the Corn Refiners Association petitioned the FDA to have high fructose corn syrup, the gooey boogeyman that's probably lurking inside your favorite soda right now, renamed "corn sugar." Even though both of those things would literally be the same product with the exact same nutritional value (that is, negative nutritional value), "sugar" apparently sounds better to our media-assaulted ears.

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Today, that is. You see, the best part is that this has actually happened once before, but the other way around. Back in the early '80s, there was a big push to replace the sugar in soda with high fructose corn syrup because ... well, because it was cheaper, but also because -- get this -- the public perception was that sugar was unhealthy, whereas high fructose corn syrup was seen as a healthier alternative. The truth is, they're both about equally bad for you because they're essentially the same goddamn thing. If we didn't know any better, we'd almost be tempted to say that all it takes for food manufacturers to buy themselves a few comfortable decades of consumers contentedly shoveling toxic swill down their gullets is a simple adjustment in terminology.

Follow C. Coville's Twitter and she will assign you a new drug name. David Rose has a blog.

For more ways to channel your inner Jedi, check out 6 Factors That Secretly Influence Who You Have Sex With and 5 Ways to Trick Your Body Into Being More Awesome.

If you're pressed for time and just looking for a quick fix, then check out 4 Signs That Educational TV Is Totally Dead.

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Related Reading: The manipulation doesn't end there! You're being mind-controlled right now, by things as simple as the color of pills you take. Corporations are working to take over your brain, too, by making you add eggs to your cake mix and convincing you that huge meals are "normal." You're probably pretty pissed at the business world right now. But, in fairness, your own brain is just as manipulative.