Everyone is annoyed by something. Many of us are annoyed by lots of things. Most of these annoyances have more to do with our personal sensitivities—our neuroses, our upbringings, our points of view—than any objective “annoying” quality. Other annoyances are so powerful, however, that they transcend race, gender, age, and culture. At the top of the list is that most convenient of modern conveniences, the cell phone—at least, when someone else is talking on it.

Researchers at the University of York have shown that cell phone chatter is particularly annoying compared to conversations in which listeners can hear both sides.

Emberson has a theory. “It actually happened to fit into my emerging worldview about how we respond to information around us,” she says. Her view is that when we hear half a conversation, such as when someone is talking on a cell phone, “our brains are always predicting what’s going to happen next, based on our current state of knowledge—this is how we learn about the world, but it also reflects how we are in the world. When something is unexpected, it draws our attention in, our brains tune into it because we’re this information-seeking, prediction-loving cognitive system—this is the idea.”

Although cell phones are fairly new, halfalogues aren’t a new annoyance. More than a century ago, Mark Twain railed against them. Twain was a man, let it be said, who found no shortage of annoyances in life, and American literature is all the richer for it. In 1880—just four years after Alexander Graham Bell first exhibited his telephone at the Centennial Exposition in Philadelphia—Twain wrote an essay called “A Telephonic Conversation,” in which he stated,