The word is from a German expression meaning earworm
. Ohrwurm means a song with such extreme catchiness that it sticks to your head for an undetermined but relatively long period of time and leaves:
- when it wants to, (although it rarely does), or
- when it's replaced with another Ohrwurm (which is very common indeed).
An Ohrwurm can be extremely pleasant or furiously irritating. Most of the time it will be the latter.
Getting rid of an Ohrwurm can be hard, but it is possible with determined action. The preferred method of evicting the menace is giving it some company (note that this does NOT involve inserting foreign objects into the ear canal); Ohrwürmer (that's plural) are not social beings and will very, very rarely tolerate another member of their species. That's why listening to another song repeatedly may eventually result in a coup d'êtat
, as the new candidate forces the former inhabitant to leave.
When using the method described above, it is important to select the replacing song carefully, since it is more than likely that the new Ohrwurm will also stay for a considerable time.
There are only two known ways of getting rid of Ohrwürmer permanently:
The former method is widely considered unhealthy and has several nasty
side effects; the latter method, alternatively, is not easy to implement
in practice, for it requires a constant stream of musical
stimuli and
uninterrupted concentration.
The Ohrwurm is merely a nuisance, not a serious threat to mental or physical health. There are no known cases of Ohrwürmer causing anything more than temporary irritation and, occasionally, slight insomnia. The longest continuous cases recorded are two instances which lasted for three full consecutive days; first one caused by an Emerson, Lake and Palmer version of the hymn Jerusalem
(originally composed by Charles Parry to a text by William Blake), and the other one by Arcturus' The Chaos Path
. The patient did not experience any discomfort in either case and fully recovered.