Chillifrog

Words

It was the linguist JR Firth who, in 1930, coined the term phonoaesthetics to refer to the study of how words sound. I came across it recently when, 26 years later than most, I heard Marlow ask in Dennis Potter’s The Singing Detective: “What’s the loveliest word in the English language, officer? In the sound it makes in the mouth? In the shape it makes in the page? E-L-B-O-W.” (And yes, for anyone else who didn’t know, it is where the band got its name.)

The film Donnie Darko offers a tip of its hat, too, in the lines of Drew Barrymore’s character, teacher Karen Pomeroy: “This famous linguist once said that of all the phrases in the English language, of all the endless combinations of words in all of history, ‘cellar door’ is the most beautiful.” The famous linguist was none other than JRR Tolkien, and he made the claim in his 1955 lecture English and Welsh.

There’s also Robert Beard’s The 100 Most Beautiful Words in English. Although you’re unlikely to agree with them all, Beard’s list does help make some phonetic links: the B and L common to bungalow, elbow and one of my favourites, for example. Long vowels and liquid sounds such as L and R have been considered particularly beautiful since the ancient Greeks, but I’d love to know where B fits in.

So, in no particular order, here are five that for me illustrate Tolkien’s description of the phonetic pleasure of words as “simpler, deeper-rooted, and yet more immediate” than any practical or structural understanding of their sense.

cwtch

Beautiful and useful, it fills the space created by my loathing of the word cuddle or the even more egregious snuggle. (A chap who asked if I “fancied a snuggle?” once had the same effect on my libido as salt on slugs.) Admittedly it’s not English - Tolkien also believed “cellar doors” to be more frequent in Welsh - but, as none of the Welsh friends from whom I learned it were Welsh-speakers, it’s in.

kecks

First heard used with a provocative wiggle (“Do you like my new kecks?”) by a lad from Leeds on whom I had a crush. Both kecks and cwtch possess a splash of nostalgia (not least for the days of maintenance grants, which allowed word-lovers to mudlark further afield) but I love their sound, too: short, punchy, and based on the voiceless velar stop. K, however, was considered one of the least beautiful sounds by the ancient Greeks, so perhaps it’s a personal quirk.

beetroot

No liquid sounds here, either, but B makes a reappearance. A down-to-earth word with no time for fripperies. I suspect menus that describe it as “creamy” miss the point. Unlike a red, red rose, beetroot illustrates Paul Claudel’s belief that “to beware adjectives is the beginning of style”.

rococo

Closer to a classical sense of phonetic beauty, it’s as smooth and chubby as a cherub. And finally (those Bs and Ls again) …

balalaika

A word as sensuous as a single malt. I never did get to kiss the boy in the corduroys but, if I had, I’m sure it would have been as lovely as “balalaika”.

Fraud, bloodshed and votes

The long, hard road to democracy. Decades ago, and for most of its history, political corruption was endemic in America. And not just in Boss Tweed’s old New York and the venal corridors of Tammany Hall, but also the towns of America’s heartland. And although Harry Truman was as decent and fair as any American president, he got his start in the rampant fraud and bloodshed of Tom Pendergrast’s Kansas City political machine:

“[Harry Truman] was not chosen because the people of Missouri wanted him to speak for them in the corridors of power; he was chosen instead because the Kansas City machine needed somebody to fill that office. But he was not Tom Pendergast’s first choice for that purpose.

“Did Truman benefit from their ghost votes and repeat votes and riders and sleepers? The fraudulent voting practices of the Pendergast machine in the 1936 election were shown, by investigations after Pendergast’s fall, to have been gargantuan. In his biography of Truman, Robert Ferrell has reported that a single house at 912 Tracy Street managed to produce 141 voters, and a vacant lot at 700 Main Street yielded 112 voters. The Second District, with a population of 18,478, brought in 19,202 votes for Pender­gast’s ticket, to 12 (who could they have been?) for the opposition. The total Kansas City vote would have been possible legitimately only if the city had had 200,000 more adults than its actual population. Indeed, everything was up-to-date in Kansas City, they had gone about as far as they could go.

“That was in 1936, when the machine reached its apogee of power and seems to have lathered itself in heedless arrogance. Had it been true also in 1934, when Harry Truman was making his first bid for the Senate? Perhaps not on the grandiose scale of two years later, but Ferrell has reported that that dependable Second District gave him 15,145 votes, to 24 for his oppo­nent, and that when that district is joined to two other equally lopsided Kansas City districts, one can account for the entire margin by which Tru­man carried the state. His ‘realistic’ defense of his link to Pendergast’s Kansas City organization might not win over every critic: that ‘any politi­cian’ who could do so would ally himself with an organization that con­trolled 100,000 votes.

“In the years that Truman was preparing to run for the Senate, Kansas City would come to the attention of the nation and the world because of the spectacular outrages committed by its underworld figures. … Time magazine, on April 9, 1934, gave the follow­ing report on the municipal election in the city from which Harry Tru­man received his pivotal support, in the year in which he was elected senator:

‘Sprawled across the sidewalk in front of a Kansas City polling place lay the body of William Findley, Negro election worker, blood on his face, a bullet in his brain… .

‘Slumped in a heap lay Lee Flacy, deputy sheriff, pumped full of buckshot… .

‘A mortal head wound crumpled Larry Cappo, sleek little gang­ster … in the back of a wrecked sedan.

‘A few doors away Pascal Oldham, 78, hardware merchant, was locking up his store when he turned to see a car flash by, to hear guns crackle. A stray bullet drilled clean through his head… .

‘Slugged and beaten with blackjacks, brass knuckles, gun-butts and baseball bats were a housewife, a Kansas City Star newshawk, a can­didate for the City Council, a chauffeur, a policeman, and five other persons.

‘Such was last week’s score in Kansas City’s municipal election. When blackjacks were pocketed and votes were counted, Kansas Citi­zens knew the worst: The Fusion attempt to break the rule of Boss Thomas Joseph (‘Big Tom’) Pendergast’s Democratic machine had failed. Re-elected by a 59,566 plurality was Boss-backed Mayor Bryce Byram Smith, a mild-mannered baking company official in his spare time. Defeated was Dr. Albert Ross Hill, 64, anti-Boss Democrat, one­time (1908-20) president of the University of Missouri… .’ “

Author: William Lee Miller   

Title: Two Americans