Feb 16, 2010

Cellar door

Yesterday's language column in the NYT mentions "cellar door" as an expression of special beauty. Tolkien loves it. H.L. Mencken loves it, finds it "intrinsically musical". Shakespeare scholar C.L. Hooper includes it in the list of words he loves most, next to "dubloon", "squadron", "Sphinx" and "Jungfrau". And so on and so forth.

Cellar door. Cellar door. Cellar door.

Cellar door. Cellar door. Cellar door.


I don't get it.

I like "dubloon", though.

2 comments:

Unknown said...

I don't get cellar door either. Perhaps, in my case, it's because I hear it so often. Here, there is a music venue named Cellar Door and they are always advertising on the radio.

I use the word "gonna" when chatting and today I typed it goona, which, for me was a new word. I looked it up on Urban Dictionary and found it to be slang for gonna. Slang for slang. I like that. Let's come up for slang for slang for slang. Who knows? Maybe there is slang for goona.

Dirk said...

As we all know, English is a matter of pronunciation. What if we imagine a visitor to the MoMA murmuring "Shall adore, shall adore" with his speech defect and the NYT author within hearing distance...

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