When I hear the word ‘serpent,’ my brain conjures a willfully angry and vengeful creature, a beast slithering toward its prey. The monster’s aim is emphatically malevolent, its mind filled with animosity. ‘Snake,’ on the other hand, does not arouse in me the tendency to ascribe the same sense of bitter acrimony to the creature.
I assign blame for my decidedly different reactions to synonymous words to ‘psychologically induced linguistic perturbation.’ If that phrase is actually used in the real world, I should get royalties.
