http://mashable.com/2011/08/31/google-growth-peak/
Already falling off? I don't use it as much as I did initially, primarily because there are just too few people on it and it doesn't have the home feel of facebook.
Thursday, September 1, 2011
Wednesday, February 24, 2010
Words
It occurred to me today that certain words have a definite feel to their sound, quite apart from their meanings. I've heard that J. R. R. Tolkien once said that the most beautiful phrase in the English language was 'cellar door'. It's hard to divorce the meaning of this phrase from its sound though, so I like to think of it with a Tolkienesque spelling, Selador. Now that's beautiful.
Other words have different feelings attached however. I feel that the word 'clickable' has a feel to the way the sounds roll off the tongue quite apart from its rather mundane meaning. It's like eating a good piece of chocolate with just the right texture, smoothness, and perhaps a hint of nuttiness. I've always had a fondness for Welsh words as well. Cwm - coombe, corwgl - coracle, and twr - tor seem to have a real feel of the things they describe. What about gloaming, an Anglo-Saxon derivative; its cognate gloom seems to have lost something of its original meaning. Words beginning with gl- are often cheerful, bright and shiny or smooth and sharp, take glisten, glitter, glimmer, glass, gloss, glaze, glare, glam, glory, glow, glint, glad, glance, glee, and gleed. There are exceptions, like globe and glue, but it's odd nevertheless.
I believe there is a reason why Jane Austen chose the name Pemberley as the house wherein her hero in Pride and Prejudice resides. The initial syllabic structure is entirely labial with frontal vowels; an unvoiced plosive gives way across an open-mid vowel to a beautiful nasal and voiced plosive consonant cluster. The word ends with an elegant, flourishing whorl as it rises from the liquid into the high crescendo of a close vowel. The phonesthesia apparent in this word is obviously not lost on Austen's readers, few would suggest a better name for the residence of Mr. Darcy.
Although the theories advanced by scholars such as Margaret Magnus and Vilyanur S. Ramachandran are usually regarded with suspicion at best by the orthodox linguistic community, there is little doubt that some combinations of sounds seem to have a basic inherent meaning of their own. The bouba/kiki effect is well attested and seems to be culturally and linguistically independent. In the end, we must simply ask ourselves the deceptively simple question, would a rose by any other name smell as sweet?
Other words have different feelings attached however. I feel that the word 'clickable' has a feel to the way the sounds roll off the tongue quite apart from its rather mundane meaning. It's like eating a good piece of chocolate with just the right texture, smoothness, and perhaps a hint of nuttiness. I've always had a fondness for Welsh words as well. Cwm - coombe, corwgl - coracle, and twr - tor seem to have a real feel of the things they describe. What about gloaming, an Anglo-Saxon derivative; its cognate gloom seems to have lost something of its original meaning. Words beginning with gl- are often cheerful, bright and shiny or smooth and sharp, take glisten, glitter, glimmer, glass, gloss, glaze, glare, glam, glory, glow, glint, glad, glance, glee, and gleed. There are exceptions, like globe and glue, but it's odd nevertheless.
I believe there is a reason why Jane Austen chose the name Pemberley as the house wherein her hero in Pride and Prejudice resides. The initial syllabic structure is entirely labial with frontal vowels; an unvoiced plosive gives way across an open-mid vowel to a beautiful nasal and voiced plosive consonant cluster. The word ends with an elegant, flourishing whorl as it rises from the liquid into the high crescendo of a close vowel. The phonesthesia apparent in this word is obviously not lost on Austen's readers, few would suggest a better name for the residence of Mr. Darcy.
Although the theories advanced by scholars such as Margaret Magnus and Vilyanur S. Ramachandran are usually regarded with suspicion at best by the orthodox linguistic community, there is little doubt that some combinations of sounds seem to have a basic inherent meaning of their own. The bouba/kiki effect is well attested and seems to be culturally and linguistically independent. In the end, we must simply ask ourselves the deceptively simple question, would a rose by any other name smell as sweet?
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