Ah, words!

Some old guy, Poe or Shelley or someone, said that cellar door was the most beautiful word in the English language. I have two problems with that. First of all, it's two words. Secondly, although it is evocative of darkness and mystery and fear, all of which I find exciting in a literary sense, I believe it to be, at best, the penultimate in terms of beauty. In my opinion, the most beautiful of words must be medieval. Then perhaps cellar door, and then the antepenultimate might be defenestration. But penultimate and antepenultimate seem deserving as well. So many words, so few top three rankings.

Medieval is such a terrific word to me because of all its connotative desserts which I have enjoyed from an early age. Obviously, I hadn't the slightest idea of how to spell it as a child, so I naturally assumed it was mid-evil, in the middle of evil. Those were trying times, as we all know, so my spelling made sense - evil days deserve evil spellings. Eventually I learned how to spell it properly, but the dark, foreboding sense of the earlier spelling lingered on. Even now the correct spelling conjures up images of magic, fairy tales, and perpetual night. And that is what I love about the word. The Middle Ages (medium - middle, ævum - era, age) were saturated in myth and legend of such diversity and scope that no one could ever know them all. But they were all astonishingly real to the listeners. There really were underwater kingdoms, wailing banshees, and thundering gods in the storm. And being the romantic that I am, these are all wonderful things. Even today I firmly believe myth provides deep insight into the nature of man (see "On Fairy Stories," available in the book Tree and Leaf by JRR Tolkien, for one exceptional explanation) and is a worthwhile study for the classroom, despite our greater understanding of the world around us. So what is there not to love about medieval? It is a perfect word.

But the multitude of striking words in the English language is fabulous. Penultimate and antepenultimate, meaning second-to-last and third-to-last respectively, are great words too, but for a completely different reason. I learned these words in the context of music, where they are used to describe the few closing measures of a piece, since the end is often of special importance. They are completely unnecessary, and that's why I love them. Even with hyphens, third-to-last has fewer letters than antepenultimate, and it has the added benefit of preventing embarassment when the author realizes too late that he actually published antipenultimate. So instead of occuring in the third-to-last measure, the noted feature is very obviously anti the penultimate measure, truly at war with it. Music scholars may note that the occasional belligerence of the misspelled term does not detract from the correct term's precision. But in music, you can also always just provide the exact measure number. I suppose it is exciting, though, when a composer's music goes off to war against itself. So despite the possible confusion and snobbish air of the word, or rather, because of those very traits which render the words so silly, I love them.

English does not only provide its speakers with scholarly words that are absurd and marvelous, it also provides the rare gift of everyday words with special twists. Take for example, the instance pointed out to me by my good friend Paul. In reading my earlier blog about pop singers rhyming thing with thing and minute with minute, he suggested that artists are allowed to rhyme a small subset of words with themselves. And he is absolutely correct. One such example is the word orange, which has no rhyming words in English. So obviously if you want to rhyme it, it must rhyme with itself. I had previously heard that silver and purple also fall into this category and began to think that maybe there was some sort of color monopoly on anti-rhyme. But after some research, I discovered that silver rhymes with chilver (a female lamb) and purple with curple (a horse's hindquarters) and hirple (to walk lamely - whatever that means). Try using one of those in conversation at work on Monday and see what sort of looks you get! There are a few others too, and I will now attempt a sentence with as many as possible:

The plankton-eating sasquatch, upon finding yttrium on his uvula, stood from the toilet on the plinth to seek the sacred ninja penguin's advice on whether, as a bachelor, he should vacuum his home to avoid allowing jejune protists from spoiling the celestial syzygy that evening.

I simply do not think I can continue - that was way to much fun. Defenestration will have to wait until next time. Until then, beware of bulbous chimneys!