Why Pickle Octopus

It started with a goal: find two words that make the catchiest possible song. Then check whether anything in the dictionary beats them.

I wanted something that gets stuck in your head the way Baby Shark does. So the first question was what the simplest earworms have in common.

They have something you can repeat like a drum. Most of them bolt it on. Baby Shark adds doo doo doo.

The rare version is when the word’s own ending does it.

Say octopus. Now say just the end of it. Pus, pus, pus. It works.

Now try kangaroo. Roo, roo, roo. It goes soft.

Almost every word in English goes soft.

Octopus was where I’d landed by ear. So I ran every word in the CMU Pronouncing Dictionary, about 130,000 of them, to see if anything beat it. Eight survived. Five were two words glued together. One was abstract. Two were left, and platypus is rarer and harder to say.

Which leaves one.

Then I scored 577 candidates for the word in front of it on six things: hard consonants shared with octopus, how cleanly it hands off to the next word, whether it moves around the mouth or stays in one spot, how bright the vowel is, how many pops it has, and how short it is.

Pickle came first, by the widest margin in the top forty.

You can feel one of those six. Pocket shares more consonants with octopus than pickle does, and it still lost. Say pocket octopus. Then say pickle octopus. Notice where your tongue stops.

On pocket, it stops at the T. On pickle it doesn’t stop at all. P at the lips, K at the back of the throat, L rolling off the tongue tip. Pop, pop, roll.

Then I built the song the same way. A two-word phrase has a front, a seam, and a tail, so there are only three things you can do to it: repeat the front (Pickle Pickle Pickle Pickle), echo the tail (Pickle Octo-pus-pus-pus-pus), or cut it off before it finishes (Pickle Octo…).

The hardest cut was the ending. I wrote a big final chorus and cut it after hearing it, because a triumphant ending says “I think this is a real song” and a flat one says “I know exactly what this is.”

That’s the whole method. Define what working means. Enumerate the options. Score them. Cut what hasn’t earned its place.

I ran it on a name. Then on a song.

It’s what I do to B2B SaaS pages.

Now go listen to the song again. Let it get stuck in your head. Then reach out and let’s chat. :)

— Steinar