Language With a Certain Mouthfeel

Hi, you have A Way with Words.

Hi, Martha. This is Seanette Good from Atlanta, Georgia.

Hey, Seanette.

Hi, thank you for taking my call.

I have something I’d like to share with you today, see if you can help me find a solution.

Happy to try.

Okay, so I’m not calling today to find out the origins of a word, but to find a word.

I have often said that a word has a certain taste.

And I think what I really mean by that is how it feels as you’re saying the word.

So some words just seem to kind of dance out of your mouth while others just kind of stumble and just fall out.

So the way that a word, as it is being formed in your mouth and then is presented to the world, can either feel very pleasant, like a creamy cheesecake, or it can feel very awkward and unpleasant, like for me, the texture of oatmeal.

So that feel of a word and whether that is considered pleasant or not, is there a word in existence for that?

Oh, I love these descriptions, cheesecake versus oatmeal.

Yeah, there are several answers.

I’m glad that we can help you.

This has been poets have found an answer for this, and so have linguists.

So some people who think about language a lot from two different directions have come up with solutions for this very question.

And one of the words they’ve borrowed comes from the food world, where when people are trying to describe food, which is actually rather difficult.

It’s difficult to talk about food, which is why it’s easy to make fun of the way that wine lovers talk about the taste of wine or foodies talk about how they enjoy a meal because describing taste is difficult.

Describing the texture of food is difficult.

But one of the words they use is mouthfeel.

Like you might talk about the mouthfeel of a good beer or a good wine, and it’s about the body of it.

It’s about the way that it sits in your mouth, on your tongue, or the way it touches your palate.

Or if you’re talking about the mouthfeel of a cut of meat, does it leave a layer of fat on your teeth?

Or does it chew well?

Or you might talk about a food that’s spicy level.

Does it leave a spicy heat or does it have a kind of chemical coolness like cucumber does or yogurt can or garlic can, you know?

So all of these things are mouthfeel.

Does that feel like a word that is what you’re talking about?

It does.

The imagery is very similar to what it feels like for words that are pleasant.

Words such as shenanigans feels a whole lot better coming out than the word rule.

So the mouthfeel definitely is a better description than taste as I’m not swallowing and ingesting these words, but instead to come out into the world.

So on a more technical level, poets and linguists have a kind of an umbrella term that they use to talk about this, and it’s called phonaesthetics.

It’s P-H-O-N-A-E-S-T-H-E-T-I-C-S, Phonesthetics.

And Phonesthetics is about that.

It’s about the aesthetic properties of sound, and particularly in poetry.

It’s about how we react to hearing or speaking language.

And we do have connotations.

Sometimes it’s about, well, let me put it a different way.

I don’t know if you have children, but if you’ve ever discussed with a partner or somebody who’s going to have kids about naming a child, you often have these very impulsive and emotional responses to names, and you don’t know why.

Sometimes you say, well, there was a mean kid in kindergarten, and I’m not naming my child because I know a mean kid who had that name.

But sometimes you don’t know why a name doesn’t feel right to you.

And sometimes you don’t know why a name feels great to you.

And that’s phonoaesthetic sometimes.

And we also can talk about euphony, E-U-P-H-O-N-Y.

That’s about a word being harmonious and pleasant.

If it has euphony, it is a delight to hear.

I’m thinking about in French, you know, when a sommelier talks about wine, they talk about la bouche, you know, the bouche, the mouth.

And by that they mean the mouthfeel or the taste.

The body.

Yeah, the taste and the body.

And, Chonette, when Grant asked you about how that sounded to you, now I’m thinking about ear feel.

Is ear feel different from mouth feel?

See, I think it’s not just how it sounds, but it’s the formation of the word, whether it’s soft words or whether it’s graceful.

Yes.

Chonette, thank you so much for your time.

We really appreciate it.

Thank you so much for helping me out here with these words today.

I’ll take that with me.

All right.

Bye-bye.

Y’all have a great day.

Take care.

Bye-bye.

What are the words that feel amazing coming out of your mouth?

Share them with us, 877-929-9673, or email words@waywordradio.org.