Beautiful and Ugly Words

When I first started writing poetry in my teens I took a course from a man named FG Stoddard at East Stroudsburg University in the Poconos (then it was called East Stroudsburg State College). Professor Stoddard one day said the most beautiful word in the English language was "cellar."

I never particularly liked that word because first of all we said "basement," at our house, and "cellar" was a word that I had heard only when visiting relatives in Clear Lake, Iowa. They called the "basement" a "cellar." I didn't know if this was because it was so damp in their basement (they used to take showers down there, and it didn't have ventilation). I associated "cellar" with a damp underground area composed of cinder blocks with piles of fishing rods and cereal boxes and water bottles (my grandparents wanted to use it as a place to ride out a nuclear winter, perhaps).

To what extent are the "beauty" of words associated with their meaning, or with the context in which various people use them?

At Mississippi State University a professor there does a study every year or so of the words his students find the most beautiful and ugly. I was listening to Sly and the Family Stone's "Everyday People," on the car radio, when there was this news flash, and a female DJ came on to discuss the new findings. I had just dropped off my daughter at play practice (she's Polyxena in Seneca's Trojan Women), when this fascinating bit came on.

On the list of beautiful words the DJ said were "beautiful," "Jesus," "eloquent," and "love."

"Cellar" is not on the list. Now sitting at my desk I just googled and found the study the DJ had referenced without naming it. I think the study is flawed because there is not enough of a distinction made between the "music" of a word, and the "semantic;" or between the sign, and its significance.

The softness of the consonants in "cellar" was perhaps a rationale for the beauty of the word back in 1975 when FG Stoddard told us about "cellar." I could understand that as a sound structure in and of itself it held beauty, even if its content did not (at least my grandparents' cellar did not seem to be organized around the concept of beauty).

On the other hand, I love "Jesus" the person, and God, but I don't think the "z" sound at the center of the word is particularly lovely, nor are the hard consonants of G and D particularly easy to deal with in poems. God rhymes with "cod." I do not like to eat fish, or to smell them.

"Love" is a nice thing (depends on whether it's a hippy saying the word or someone with a brain, I guess -- but by "brain" I don't mean a clever advertising copywriter, who writes, "You'll love these chips, you moron!").

"Eloquent" is a nice word, but so Latinate! I remember a push by Hemingway and others to get away from Latinate diction and to use the one-syllable Anglo-Saxon derived words such as "sun," "mud," and "cow," and "guts." Those words have beauty. The Latinate words often have pretentiousness.

Meanwhile, at Mississippi State the ugliest words include "ugly," which strikes me as an interesting problem. How many students took part in the study, and how many wanted to be poets? How many ever really listen to words? Here's a link to the original article:

http://www.msstate.edu/web/media/detail.php?id=5315

Is the word "ugly," itself "ugly"?

The ugliest word, the students decided, is "phlegm."

But that's a beautiful word. It has five consonants and only one vowel, which makes it a rarity in that it has two letters that are not sounded. I find it to be a curious word. Curious and rare equals beautiful, to me, even if the actual goop ejected from the throat of a three-pack-a-day wino outside a bar in Trenton, NJ is not exactly my idea of the pulchritudinous.

Can you think of words that have even more consonants but only one vowel? My wife finds "strength" to be a very funny word because of all its consonants and its solitary vowel, crunched between seven consonants. Such words can't exist in Finnish, which is the most singable language in the world after Latin because of its lovely and frequent vowels. Finnish opera is full-strength beauty, even if after the aria a singer has to eject phlegm. "Strengths" goes one further than "strength." Some Jewish words might elongate without vowels. "Schlongs," for instance, which we shall not define further. In Hebrew I think the vowels are assumed, and so left out? But "schlongs" is a Yiddish word. I don't know its derivation. Yiddish is cuckoo for consonants. "Schlemiel," "schlepp," "schmuck."

Poetry is composed of words and the relative weights of words and each syllable are of course very important. I think it would be easier to write a good poem using the uglier words on the list than the ones the students MSU consider "beautiful."

The word "molest," which is not on the list of ugly or beautiful words has soft consonants and an "l" which I think is usually lovely (lullaby is considered a beautiful word by the MSU students), but I don't think one could write a poem using the term. The term is like a dagger. Even to hear it turns the world ugly and seems like the total destruction of innocence, which must be the ugliest thing on earth. "Melarkey," which has similar letters, sounds light and nice.

Lutheran is a nice word. It has so much beauty in it. When I see it, my heart leaps! Surrealism? I like that word, too.