What makes a word beautiful? Is it merely how it sounds? Or does a word’s meaning affect its aesthetic effect? Max Beerbohm had some helpful thoughts about gondola, scrofula, and other words in his essay “The Naming of Streets.” Several years ago, Grant wrote a column on this topic for The New York Times. This is part of a complete episode.
Transcript of “Beautiful Words”
You’re listening to A Way with Words, the show about language and how we use it.
I’m Grant Barrett.
And I’m Martha Barnette.
Think of a word that you consider beautiful.
Now, why is it beautiful?
Well, the English essayist Max Beerbohm had some thoughts about this.
In 1909, he wrote this.
What you take to be beauty or ugliness of sound is indeed nothing but beauty or ugliness of meaning.
You are pleased by the sound of such words as gondola, vestments, chancel, ermine, manor house.
They seem to be fraught with a subtle onomatopoeia, severally suggesting by their sounds the grace or sanctity or solid comfort of the things they connote.
You murmur them luxuriously, dreamily.
Well, prepare for a slight shock.
Scrofula, investments, cancer, vermin, warehouse.
Horrible words, are they not?
But say, gondola, scrofula, vestments, investments, and so on,
And then lay your hand on your heart and declare that the words in the first list
Are in mere sound nicer than the words in the second.
Of course they’re not.
If a 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.
That’s well put.
You think?
I do. I find that again and again, when you look up lists of people’s favorite words over the last century, because it comes up repeatedly often,
In magazine competitions or magazine surveys,
People put things like mother and love and beauty or country,
Things like that, things that they have a lot of love for
Or pride in or strong associations with.
So absolutely, we invest our words with emotion,
And somehow we think it’s the word that’s doing the caring,
But we’re doing the caring for the word.
I guess I wanted to believe that words just in and of themselves,
Devoid of meaning, had a particular kind of beauty,
But this guy is arguing otherwise.
I agree with Beerbohm. I think of words as kind of like bookshelves. I love my bookshelves for the books, not for the shelves.
Oh.
Right? They’re carrying the books, which are the things that I love. The shelves are merely doing some work for me. Most words are like that. But poetry doesn’t work unless you invest words with meanings, right?
And not just meanings, but connotations and suggestions and hints and memories.
We’ve talked before on this program about words become more powerful as we age because we have more associations attached to them,
More memories of a particular speech or book or romantic conversation or something nice that someone said that used this particular language.
Are you saying that once again we’re talking about how context is important?
It never goes away, does it?
It doesn’t.
Maybe if we said the word context 50 times.
Be lovely
