Some people are rude, some are boring and others are just plain annoying. It’s the annoying kind that really get under my skin. They might be perfectly pleasant, law-abiding figures who wear sensible shoes and read the lesson in church – there’s just something about them. My wife finds me profoundly annoying for the way I leave the gas burner on after making my statement coffee every morning – almost as annoying as my habit of storing five pairs of shoes by the stairs rather than making any attempt to put them in a cupboard. ‘Annoyance is probably the most widely experienced and least studied of all human emotions,’ wrote Joe Palca and Flora Lichtman in Annoying: The Science of What Bugs Us. ‘There is no Department of Annoying Studies or annoyingologists.’ There’s a big difference between annoyance and rudeness. The former is unfortunate, not premeditated; the latter smacks of...
I’m afraid this isn’t one of our four free articles available in full, which are set out in the first two rows of the ‘Magazine’ page.
Please click here to find them.
To buy a digital version of this issue for just £2.99, click here
