h2g2 The Hitchhiker's Guide to the Galaxy: Earth Edition

Some words are really pleasurable. They sound nice, and they feel nice on the tongue when you speak them. It's nice sometimes to contemplate words as objects in themselves, regardless of any meaning attached to them. Just lttle nuggets of sound and speech.

Flumes. Flumes. Floooooms.

Marsh. (And in the same way, 'marschieren'). When you say the word 'marsh', you can nearly hear the squelch and feel the reeds whipping your ankles.

Uvula. Yooooovyillah.

Limpets. 'Limpet' is ok, but 'limpets' is nicer, for some reason!

Claves. Cleaves. Clavinova.

I'm going to keep a little list running in this thread, where I can keep any words that are fun to play with.

('Roaring' is a good one in its Belfast guise, where it rhymes with 'mourn').

I might be quite odd, in that I think about things like this fairly regularly. It's probably the reason I enjoy poetry, too. And James Joyce, come to think of it.

Yer a poet, an ye may not know it.

I think that's true - but I think what feels good, or sounds good, depends on what dialects you're used to. Listening to C of E clergy read the Bible in England kills the poetry right dead for me.

On the other hand, this song has a mighty spiritual sound:

http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=9iJ4ySMuizU


We knew a lady when we were at university. She was about 60, and black, and from Mississippi. We accused her of having a boyfriend, a man in his 70s who was hanging around her place.

'Honey,' she said. 'I wouldn't spit on him accident'ly in the DARK.'

Now, that's funny, but the sound of what she said was funnier.

My cousin in Middle Tennessee asked where the menfolk were going.

'To find a lost calf.' ('Calf' sounds lovely in that dialect, it's like 'cay-uff'.)

The 3-year-old made big round eyes. 'Is a cay-uffa a li'beedy kyeaouw?'

In Memphis, another cousin: 'MAW-muh, kin yeouw watch thuh bay-bee whahl Sherrie'n Aah run dowun tuh tha stawhr fur uh R.C.'n uh Moooon Paah?'

I reckon poetry is where you find it.

Moon Pah sounds delicious. I don't think I really want to know what it is, although, knowing me I'll go and check for recipes right now.

Kids often get the coolest words. It is so calming to say to yourself "isn't it funny how a bear likes hunny? Buzz Buzz Buzz, I wonder why he does"

I was stumped by your ones until I read them aloud, Dmitri.

Another cool word is lumbago. Wickedly ironic, given what it means, that it sounds like it should be a sexy South American dance.

The latest dance craze - do the Lumbago.

A moon pie:

http://www.moonpie.com/

Wikipedia seems to think moon pies and RC cola were the standard working man's lunch in the south for many years. I'm glad people didn't forget healthy eating traditions when they left Scotland!

You've sussed it in one, KB. Junk food=the native cuisine of the Scots Irishman.

And cheap - for years, that was about 15 cents' worth of bad nutrition.

"Nomenclature" just popped into my head as a pleasing sound.

I'm finding this easier than MMF's "words the sound of which make you cringe" thread.

Yeah. 'Nomenclature' does sound cool. I would include that in my abecedarian book.

My dad liked the word 'facetious'. And I know where he heard it first.

I had this great English teacher in 7th grade, Mrs Mac. She was in her 70s, and was full of Fun Facts. Her husband once retrieved an 18th-century shilling from Mt Royal Boulevard, when they were resurfacing and dug down to the colonial corduroy road. (Corduroy road is a fun thin to say, too.) She made us make an abecedarian book.

Anyway, Mrs Mac loved Dickens. When we read 'A Christmas Carol', there was a bit about 'a facetious snowball'. She taught us that word, I brought it home.

The next thing I knew, I overheard my dad in an earnest discussion with another weighty engineer type gentleman.

'I'm serious,' my dad said. 'I'm not being facetious with you here.'

He continued to use that word for the rest of his life. Yay, Mrs Mac. Improving vocabulary, one kid (and engineer) at a time.

Klatsch is good, too!

There's something very Charles Dickens about that remark, yes. It wouldn't have occurred to me that snowballs were capable of *being* facetious!

That's what Elektra said.

Traditionally, linguists are supposed to have picked /cellar door/, a phrase I myself do not find particularly euphonious. I do, however, like /dystopia/, partly for the contrast between the sound and the meaning.

TRiG.

'Cellar door'' doesn't do a lot for me, for some reason. It always sticks in my head that one of Azahar's students said "washing machine" is the most beautiful sound in the English language. It isn't one I would have thought of, but I can see the point! It's got a kind of a sheen and a shine to it.

A chap called Firth wrote about this kind of thing a lot in the '30s. Because nothing's worth studying if it doesn't have a name stolen from Greeks () , he decides it's called phonaesthetics.

At secretarial school, before starting to learn shorthand, we did a little exercise whereby you had to write down words, or sounds, that were dictated to you. Some found it difficult to divorce the sound from the spelling of the word they had in their head. I don't remember the details, but, for example, it would have required you to write the words row (as in propel a boat with oars), potato, though, beau, etc using the same symbol or letter for the final syllable.

Also, having learnt several languages over the years, I have got used to certain letters having different sounds, and in this way, have learnt to listen to words simply as music, instead of having meanings. A monolingual (English-speaking) person, could perhaps glimpse this by reading "Jabberwocky" aloud.

Words in "Jabberwocky" that appeal to me are all the "O"s - toves, mome wraths etc.

The words "Cellar door" are, in keeping with the meaning, made up of dark sounds. "L", "d" and the long "oo" sound in "door" make it a sombre experience, which does have an appeal, I suppose.

I think it's the Meyers-Briggs test where, in one section, you have to tick which words you prefer out of four or five groups of three or four words each. While I was doing it with some friends, I noticed that I was choosing words with "I" vowel sounds in them - disregarding the meaning of the words. The others were most surprised at the concept of judging words on their sound alone, without considering the meaning. But you're not allowed to ask questions in the tests, so it is up to the person doing the test to make their own criteria. Oddly enough, you're not asked to explain which criteria you have used to judge the words, which probably says more about you than the words you have chosen.

I think you're onto something, there.

I've often wished I could listen to English and hear the sound of the language itself. I've now realised that there's no such thing as the sound of the language; there's just the sound of the voices of the people who use it. What I was asking is, I guess, "what does the stereotype of an English-speaking voice sound like?" And that's a much more boring question.

I don't know that it's boring.

But I think it's a matter of personal preference. I'm sure there are millions of people who find RP soothing. I find it grating.

On the other hand, I find Northern Irish accents lovely to listen to. I enjoy hearing a tale told in Appalachian dialect. 'Trainspotting' was fun for the accents (and the subtitles). Alec Cunningham makes me laugh when he uses his own accent. New Yorkers are charming, and Pittsburghese sounds homey.

Minnesotans, though, drive me nuts. 'Noooo' should not sound like that.

This might have something to do with whether you like audiobooks, which I don't, much.

By the way, there's a TV series running over here called 'Hannibal'. Yep, people get eaten. The reason it's better than watching those old movies is that the mad doctor isn't played by Anthony Hopkins, but by Mads Mikkelsen, the Dane from 'Adam's Apples'. Fascinating accent.

No no no, I will respectfully stop you in your tracks Dmitri, and say that it isn't about personal preference.

I only came here to add bramble to the list.

Well, then, I think it is - the word 'bramble' does nothing for me at all as a collection of sounds.