Saturday, September 08, 2007

Words and Wordmen

I vaguely heard some talk about favourite words on the radio earlier - it's a subject that keeps coming back. In one recent poll the popular favourite was Serendipity - good news(if too late) for Horace Walpole, who invented it. I love the title page of this site. There's a wordman if ever I saw one. Scanning the As, I see Asphodel's not taken - one of my favourites, tho I've never had occasion to use it. Someone once said that, if it wasn't for what it meant, Paraffin would be the most beautiful word in English. James Joyce, it seems, preferred Cuspidor. It's true, isn't it, that there are some words that do make you feel good - they just seem so right and solid and euphonious and that embody perfectly what they mean. A lot of practical, rather than pretty, words have this quality, I think. At which point my mind goes blank...
Posted by Nige at 9:08 am

10 comments:

  1. Bryan AppleyardSeptember 08, 2007 9:33 am

    I seem to recall Denis Potter's favourite word was 'elbow'.

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  2. NigeSeptember 08, 2007 9:37 am

    Not a bad choice, that...

    When it comes to least favourite words, high on anyone's list, surely, is Blog. Was there ever an uglier, more woefully inadequate word? Is this cybersymposium a Blog??? Ugh... Is there no alternative?

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  3. Bryan AppleyardSeptember 08, 2007 9:55 am

    Staphylococcus. Crazy name, crazy bug.

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  4. anthonynorthSeptember 08, 2007 10:05 am

    Is 'blog' a word?
    Whatever, it's getting many adaptations, such as 'blogosphere.'
    I even said recently that I'm trying to save some of my posts from 'blogivion.'
    Yes, it's horrible.

    ReplyDelete
  5. David MackinderSeptember 08, 2007 11:13 am

    'blog': from 'web log' -- so, it's a portmanteau word, which is a rather nice word . . .

    ReplyDelete
  6. Ian russellSeptember 08, 2007 12:00 pm

    journal is better than log, but b'journal sounds too like b'jesus.

    b-jo sounds like a sexual service.

    I've had a job with statistical and digital. stumbling words, I call them. It's not just me, I've heard professional speakers trip over them.

    the child in me likes onomatopoeic words - flip-flop - and words similar to onomatopoeia (it probably has its own word) but visual rather than sound. Elbow is such a word.

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  7. John HalliwellSeptember 08, 2007 12:03 pm

    'Sublime' Great, isn't it ?

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  8. AnonymousSeptember 08, 2007 12:58 pm

    I like the word "cerulean," probably because I like what it stands for. In Stoppard's "India Ink" (I think that's the play), the female protagonist's favorite word is "apricot." That one doesn't do it for me, p'raps 'cause I don't like apricots much.

    Now, here's a funny one for you: Non-speakers of English were read a list of words and they were asked to pick the one they thought sounded the most beautiful. They picked "diarrhea."

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  9. AnonymousSeptember 08, 2007 2:01 pm

    I ran across a good one this morning: crostitution - what a politician who changes parties (crosses the floor) is actually engaged in.

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  10. AnonymousSeptember 10, 2007 11:23 am

    i played Elbow, one of Shakespeare's idiot constables, in Measure for Measure, and for a while would refer to myself either as Satan or Elbow, depending on my mood. It's a good name.

    i like the word 'plinth', and can recommend getting women to say it, while you stare at their lips.

    ReplyDelete

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