Speak (sl)eazy

“Most English-speaking people, for instance, will admit that cellar door is ‘beautiful’, especially if dissociated from its sense (and its spelling). More beautiful than, say, sky, and far more beautiful than beautiful. Well then, in Welsh for me cellar doors are extraordinarily frequent.”

—-J.R.R. Tolkien on phonoaesthetic phrasing, from “English and Welsh.”

I think about this quote regularly. Before I read it, it never would have occurred to me that some words (or entire languages) could be more beautiful than others. The claim that cellar door is more beautiful to the ear — in opposition to its prosaic meaning — has been made by and attributed to a wide variety of writers over the years. H.L. Mencken referred to the term as arguably the short piece of music ever made. Cyrus Lauron Hooper said the term ranked first just above other intriguingly haunting sounds, like doubloon and sphinx.

However, my favorite springs forth from the mouth of C.S. Lewis after he had been ruminating on the sound of cellar door and was having trouble disassociating the sound from the meaning: “I was astonished when someone first showed that by writing cellar door as Selladore one produces an enchantingly proper English name.”