BEAUTIFUL WORDS

From Richard Nordquist:

In a "Beautiful Words" contest held in 1911 by the Public Speaking Club of America, several submissions were deemed "insufficiently beautiful";  among them were grace, truth, and justice.

In the judgment of Grenville Kleiser, then a popular author of books on oratory, "The harshness of the g in grace and the j in justice disqualified them, and truth was turned down because of its metallic sound" (Journal of Education, Feb., 1911).

1911). Among the acceptable entries were melody, virtue, harmony, and hope.

Over the years there have been countless playful surveys of the most beautiful-sounding words in English. Perennial favorites include lullaby, gossamer, murmuring, luminous, Aurora Borealis, and velvet. But not all recommendations have been so predictable or so obviously euphonious.

• When the New York Herald Tribune asked poet Dorothy Parker for her list of beautiful words, she replied, "To me, the most beautiful word in the English language is cellar-door. Isn't it wonderful? The ones I like, though, are check and enclosed."
• James Joyce, author of Ulysses, chose cuspidor as the single most beautiful word in English.
• In the second volume of the Book of Lists, philologist Willard R. Espy identified gonorrhea as one of the ten most beautiful words.
• Poet Carl Sandburg chose Monongahela.
• Another poet, Rosanne Coggeshall, selected sycamore.

• Ilan Stavans, a Mexican-American essayist and lexicographer, dismissed the "clichés" on a British Council survey of beautiful words (which included mother, passion, and smile) and instead nominated moon, wolverine, anaphora, and precocious.
• The favorite word of British author Tobias Hill is dog. Though he acknowledges that "canine is a beautiful word, fit for a medieval greyhound in a tapestry," he prefers "the spareness of the Anglo-Saxon in England."

• Novelist Henry James said that for him the most beautiful words in English were summer afternoon.
• When British essayist Max Beerbohm found out that gondola had been chosen as one of the most beautiful words, he replied that scrofula sounded the same to him.

Of course, like other beauty contests, these verbal competitions are shallow and absurd. Yet consciously or not, don't most of us favor certain words for their sound as well as their sense?