Description: A Chronicler's Marginalia
All babies come to that developmental stage wherein they begin popping, gurgling, and shushing to themselves as they explore the joys of vocalising. Eventually they find their way to words and often to their particular words of choice (‘no’ being favorite for obvious reasons). Sometimes children love particular words not for their meaning or anything to do with communication whatsoever, but simply for the wonderful feel of the word when spoken. I remember as a child loving words with ‘er’ sounds in them lik
Words in which sense and sound coalesce are, to my thinking, particularly satisfying. I’m not referring here to onomatopoeia but something more substantive as in words like ‘exasperation’, ‘blandish’, ‘eluctation’, ‘glorious’, ‘plight’,’treacherous’, and even the humble ‘worm’ that I so adored as a child. Indeed, some of the very words used to phonetically identify sounds do themselves aurally convey their meaning. ‘Plosive’, ‘fricative’, and ‘sibilant’ with their respective puffing, friction, and hissing a
The word ‘ exasperation ‘ (from the Latin ex-asperÅ , to make quite rough) provides a perfect example of this mingling of sound and sense for the whole word is one continuous in- and exhalation of long-suffering. Where that first blot of syllable smacks one in the face, that second vowel feels like the in-drawn breath as if one is slowly, deliberately counting to ten. This, when followed by that sibilant /s/, is the very sound of someone at their wit’s end, the monosyllabic equivalent of “God give me patien