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(This essay is an excerpt from Curtis Honeycutt's upcoming book, Good Grammar is the Life of the Party: Tips for a Wildly Successful Life.)

No matter what anybody tells you, words and ideas can change the world.

- Robin Williams as John Keating, Dead Poets Society

I have a five-year-old son. Right now toilet humor is big. Body parts are funny. Things that produce bad smells get big laughs. Basically, I'm in my comedic sweet spot when I'm with the pre-K crowd. Apparently, I act my shoe size more often than I act my age. I'm okay with that.

Guess what, fellow word nerds? According to a 2017 Springer Study that surveyed 821 participants, English speakers, as a whole, aren't any more mature than I am. The study asked participants to rate 211 words on a scale of 1 to 5, where 1 is not funny at all and 5 is downright hilarious. In total, the participants ranked nearly 5,000 words.

Let me cut to the chase and give you the top 10 funniest words in the English language in order of hilarity: booty, tit, booby, hooter, nitwit, twit, waddle, tinkle, bebop and egghead. I can safely guarantee this collection of words will never appear together in the same sentence again, although, if they did, they'd get tons of guffaws and chortles, based on the data.

Before you dismiss this list of funniest words, just know that 58 percent of respondents were women. The average age of participants was 35. Seventy percent of people who participated in the study had at least completed an undergraduate degree. So that means we can definitively say booty is a word people can't help but find funny. My five-year-old and I would certainly agree.

Whether you're an egghead or a nitwit, isn't it comforting to know we giggle at the same things? Republicans and Democrats both snicker when someone says tinkle. Black and white people alike agree that waddle is chuckleworthy. Our collective immaturity gives me hope that we are more alike than we are different. That gives me hope.

Comedic words won't necessarily fix our disagreements, but I do think they can help. So, the next time you find yourself in a frustrating ideological argument with a Twitter troll or your crazy drunk uncle, I recommend casually dropping in a few of these words into your conversation. Just don't accuse the other person of resembling one of these words; if you do, you might end up on the receiving end of a swift kick to the keister...or booty.

- Curtis Honeycutt

CurtisHoneycuttis the author of the upcoming book, Good Grammar is the Life of the Party: Tips for a Wildly Successful Life. He makes grammar fun in his nationally syndicated column, "Grammar Guy," which appears weekly in more than 30 newspapers. His amusing musings about gender-inclusive pronouns, prepositions at the end of sentences and the dreaded autocorrect function on IPhones garnered third place in the 2018 column contest sponsored by the National Society of Newspaper Columnists for print publications over 50,000.