Why I’m not in the Poets’ Union
The late wordsmith Willard R. Espy once put out a list of Ten Most Beautiful English Words, including “murmuring,” “wisteria,” and, perhaps controversially, “gonorrhea”, which I assume must have been chosen for euphony rather than for pleasant associations.
Geoff Nunberg over at Language Log has been pondering various lists of this sort, motivated by the selection of “cellar door” in The New York Times Magazine by Safire-in-the-rough Grant Barrett. Says Barrett, “cellar door” has been cited by many writers, including Dorothy Parker, as being particularly lovely.
Nunberg’s explanation for this phenomenon:
[W]hat happens when we strip “cellar door” down to its pristine phonetic bones, it turns out, is that it at once brings to mind a word from one of those warm-blooded languages English speakers invest with musical beauty, spare in clusters and full of liquids, nasals, and open syllables with cardinal vowel nuclei — the languages of the Mediterranean or Polynesia, or the sentimentalized Celtic that Lewis and Tolkein turned into a staple of fantasy fiction.
Lewis himself wrote in 1963: “I was astonished when someone first showed that by writing ‘cellar door’ as ‘Selladore,’ one produces an enchanting proper name.” Personally, I think it needs one more syllable; say, “Selladora the Explorer.”
And Nunberg concludes:
The fact is, then, that a large proportion of these “most beautiful English words” that aesthetes like to cite owe their claim to beauty entirely on a fancied resemblance to the words of other languages, rather than any inherent “English” phonaesthetic virtues. To show how great a role meaning plays in these judgments, Max Beerbohm once wrote “If ‘gondola’ were a disease, and if a ‘scrofula’ were a beautiful boat peculiar to a beautiful city, the effect of each word would be exactly the reverse of what it is. The appropriately beautiful or ugly sound of any word is an illusion wrought on us by what the word connotes.”
But that brings us back to Espy and “gonorrhea.” Can the sound of a word, simply on the basis of euphony, override an unpleasant meaning? And conversely, can pleasant connotations override harshness of sound? I’m siding with Mrs. Parker, who endorsed “cellar door,” but who also had kind words for “check enclosed.”
Sheri »
28 February 2010 · 8:23 am
Cellar door doesn’t do it for me. “Safire in the rough” — now that’s cool.
Lisa Paul »
28 February 2010 · 9:00 am
And where does that leave diarrhea?
Actually, I thought linguists agreed that Shenandoah was the most beautiful word in the English language. Other than the fact that it’s Iroquois. Or does being mentioned in a John Denver song disqualify?
CGHill »
28 February 2010 · 9:38 am
“Shenandoah” definitely made Espy’s list, and no doubt a few others.
Grant Barrett »
28 February 2010 · 12:43 pm
“Safire in the rough”! Is that something like “Winchell manqué”? ;)
fillyjonk »
1 March 2010 · 12:16 pm
My only association with “cellar door” was a children’s clapping game that contained the line, “shout down my rain barrel, slide down my cellar door”
As all of my little friends and I grew up in houses with (more or less) finished basements, I couldn’t quite understand how a person could slide down a cellar door, until many years later when I saw an older house with an exterior-access cellar with those slanted doors.
I never thought of it as being a particularly lovely word, though. Though I would agree with both wisteria and Shenandoah.