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It's been said that the most beautiful combination of words in English is cellar door. But why?
After this caller raised the question, Grant did even more digging on the topic. The result: He wrote an article about it that appeared in the New York Times.
Released July 19, 2010.
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Photo by Wayne Wilkinson. Used under a Creative Commons license.
Grant & Martha,
OK, so I listened to the podcast. "Cellar door" has got to be a meme. Its meaning is not beautiful, nor is its sound. In fact, I had never heard of that two-word combo described as being beautiful. I liked Martha's suggestions of "lullaby" and even "microchip." Guess it has something to do with how the word rolls off the tongue.
I read somewhere (don't recall the source) that the single most "beautiful" word in the English language was "illumination." I like that. It does indeed roll off the tongue. Plus, it has a beautiful meaning as well. And then there's the additional meaning, from the pre-Gutenberg era, of literally making a word beautiful by the addition of color or gold or silver leaf. I was unable to locate the source online, but I really do like that word.
Kinda' on the same topic, I always felt the word "cacophony" was somehow evocative of its meaning. It is an ugly (sounding) word.
Interestingly, none of these words makes Robert Beard's Top 100 List.
I always assumed (not sure where I read/heard this but it goes way back) is that the beauty of the words "Cellar Door" is when they are spoken with an refined English accent. I'm sure you all are sounding it out now in your best James Mason/Laurence Olivier voice. To me I always thought that it was a thing of beauty when spoken in that way. Excellent topic.
Words that sound beautiful, huh?
susurrus
murmur
mellifluous
ululation
eukalele
Walla-Walla (because it just feels good to say it)
cessation
There's a pattern, here, that's not all that hard to see. 🙂
One I thought of is amusing because it's from the movie "Protocol" with Goldie Hawn. She relates the story of her and her friend/cousin(?) going to see "Baba Noctananda" who was an old hermit who lived blah blah blah.
Baba Noctananda. Baba Noctananda. Say it a few times. 🙂
What makes a word "beautiful"? Is beauty in the mind of the speaker?
Homophones is such a beautiful word though. It sounds like a name brand for a cell phone. Or maybe some manly steel and construction yellow package. Call it 'HombrePhone'.
I may be biased. But I like to think that the beauty of a word is both in it's sound and the images it brings up.
Vacation
Home
Fun
Lunch
Love
And of course: "It's got a sort of woody quality about it. Gorn. Gorn. Much better than 'newspaper' or 'litterbin'."
(http://orangecow.org/pythonet/sketches/woodytin.htm)
I've always liked the flowing reduplication of "borborygmus".
dilettante said:
And of course: "It's got a sort of woody quality about it. Gorn. Gorn. Much better than 'newspaper' or 'litterbin'."
(http://orangecow.org/pythonet/sketches/woodytin.htm)
As long as we're Barely Sequitur, The Vestibules did a skit about words that are just fun to say: Bulbous Bouffant
I know Martha expressly excluded "butterfly" (along with "love" and "mother") when asking what words we listeners find beautiful in sound, but I couldn't resist the opportunity to share this story:
A group of students at an international university were sitting around one day when the conversation got round to whether the nature of a thing determines the nature of the word used to refer to it. The American suggested "butterfly" and said that the name resembles the creature: colorful, ephemeral, carefree.
The French student agreed, adding that "papillon" is also a beautiful word, no doubt because it names a beautiful thing, and the Spaniard added that the same was true of "mariposa". The Italian threw in his own opinion that "farfalla" was transcendently appealing.
With that, the German student huffed once, folded his arms, and growled "und vat is wrong mit 'Schmetterling'?"
GuyInMilwaukee said:
I always assumed (not sure where I read/heard this but it goes way back) is that the beauty of the words "Cellar Door" is when they are spoken with an refined English accent. I'm sure you all are sounding it out now in your best James Mason/Laurence Olivier voice. To me I always thought that it was a thing of beauty when spoken in that way. Excellent topic.
As I am reading this (Harry Potter playing in the back ground, read by Jim dale) I hear "cellar door" in a semi posh English accent, you know it doesn't sound that different than when I say it.
One of my favorites is "scruples". On the other end, a lot of people hate the word "moist".
Here's another allusion to the beauty of "cellar door", courtesy of the Tufts University Center for Cognitive Studies (and Bill Griffith):
http://ase.tufts.edu/cogstud/incbios/RayJackendoff/language.pdf
Martha Barnette
Grant Barrett
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