Something to chew on

It’s the slurping. Or that sound like somebody’s eating pretzels despite the absence of anything crunchy on their plate. Everybody is annoyed by the eating habits of family members, friends or dinner guests.

The Word of Mouth Blog on The Guardian’s Web site has an essay on why we’re driven crazy by certain sounds and the lengths to which some people will go to remove those sounds from the dinner table. The first few paragraphs might be enough to send some people over the edge, just from the visualization of this poor person’s cubicle mate:

I was mulling this over recently while reading a series of increasingly

irate tweets from someone who was being driven slowly mad by a

colleague eating apples in his vicinity — the constant crunching,

followed each time by a quick, wet slurpy intake of juice was just too

much.