Words About Words

I love the English language.
Well, I'd probably love all the other ones, too.
But, as my parents and elders always warned with everything that sounded like a lame waste of time, I regret not taking the time to learn anything other than l'Anglais.

Tolkien, an author famous for his abundant (& often overbearing) use of descriptive words thought and wrote at length on the inherent beauty of language. He thought at such length about it that he'd even chosen a word that he thought the most beautiful in the English language: cellardoor. Tolkien loved the C that sounds like an S and just the way the word flows perfectly. While I do see his point, I stumbled upon a word I liked even more one evening while watching Jeopardy: I think the world circumlocution is probably the one I'd hang on my wall in a frame fit for a melting clock or a can of soup.
I don't really know why. I just like it. Turns out, I'm not Tolkien.
Surprise!

Still; there's actually a certain class of word that I have thought a lot about, and come to love on my own terms. I love words that are self descriptive.

I need to be precise: I'm not talking about onomatopoeia, here.
(Everyone get your memory of childhood PBS ready for spelling that: O-N-O. M-A-T. O-P-O. E-I-A.)
Onomatopoeia, of course, is when a word describes the source of the sound the word describes. That's a Tolkien-esque mouthful, but it's not a hard concept to grasp. Bang! BOOM! Snap. Crackle. Pop.
Rice Krispies are actually the best lesson in onomatopoeia there is.
& they're part of this nutritionally balanced breakfast!

No, I mean words that describe an action or feeling, and in their spelling or pronunciation actually embody that same action or feeling. I got thinking on writing this post after reading over the blog entries I'd written already; I noticed that the word "coolly" popped up in both of the lengthy ones. It's a word that, when I wrote the Dexter post, I had to Google to make sure it wasn't something I was making up as I was going along. Indeed, it's a word, and I love to use it! Before I even get to the verb I'm describing, I feel it'll be as cool as a thirties jazz lounge; the word coolly just exerts this cool aura. By typing or saying coolly, you've made something sound cool before even knowing what it is. The adverb does the work.
In a similar vein, say the word smooth out loud for me. The sm- & -th flow like bookends, and we wouldn't ooh (or aah) at impressive things if that didn't flow smoothly out of the mouth. All those letters and only one syllable? The word smooth is smoother than I'll ever be.

Here's another great one: awkward. Ks are one of the rarer letters in our language (worth 5 points in Scrabble; topped only by Q, J, X & Z for rarity), and if I had to guess, it's because it's not really versatile. There are languages based on the Roman Alphabet that omit it altogether because it's a little superfluous.
(Sidebar: do you really need eleven letters to say what superfluous says? The word length, if you ask me, is a little superfluous.)
Back to business; when you put a W on each side of a K, it's just cumbersome. On a scale of one to ten, awkward rates at least a 9 on most awkwardly spelled words.
And cumbersome, with those Ms & that B, is definitely a little cumbersome to say.
I'll talk a little more about what the letter B did there in the word cumbersome. Or even further back in bang & boom. It's the strongest sound in the words. What a letter! I bet you can't name me a word where the B would be silent. Such a strong consonant is not meant to be subtle.
Reading this must be becoming arduous by now. I'm rambling a little. Wait, how do you pronounce that one? Ard-you-us? Ard-jew-us?
Man, it's a labor to even think about.

I'd also be remiss to skip the holy grail of cusses: the word fuck is in a class its own. It's so powerful and inherent that it should almost be onomatopoeia... but a fuck in the noun/verb sense definitely doesn't sound like that.
So, no onomatopoeia.
Still, there's a video that's as old as the internet that explains that it can do everything. I'm sure it's partially psychology at this point, but it's just satisfying. For a word that can be any part of speech and means pretty much everything, it still manages to speaks for itself.
It's ubiquitous.
(What does ubiquitous even mean? I've never looked it up, but I see it everywhere.)

Contrary to a word that always makes sense, there's another class of word I've come to love: words that don't make any fucking sense.
...anymore, that is.
The evolution of language is an awesome thing, rivaled in complexity and intrigue perhaps only by the evolution of things that breathe.

Think about your car. It has a dashboard. We've all been raised to know that a dashboard is what's in front of you, facing you, when you sit in your car. We spend our teen years searching for paradise by its light. But did you ever actually question why it's called that? I guess it sort of resembles a board, insomuch as a contoured plastic surface covered in buttons and lights can resemble a flat plank of wood. And, dash makes sense because...
...
...
no, it really doesn't.
This is because the word dashboard is a relic from the horse & buggy days. With so many horses on the roads, they'd often get quite muddy, and if your horse was performing to its maximum potential (one horsepower!), it could kick that dirt all over you. So, for when the horse dashed, you installed a flat board in front of you to keep the mud off. That word has persisted until today, just like measuring car capability in horsepower.

How about the word rewind vs fast forward? Fast forward makes sense; you're quickly zipping through content to get to a particular point. So its opposite should logically be... fast backward? Shouldn't it?
This is one that I don't have to explain to many reading this, but I will anyways: VHS tapes & cassette tapes stored their media on literal reels of tape that slowly unwound from one reel to another, and were read by headers. When you finished, it was considered a common courtesy to re-wind that tape from the second reel back to the first for its next user or for your future self. Obviously, this technology has been made obsolete with the digital revolution.
In the future, like a dashboard, that Be Kind, Rewind movie will be a nomenclature puzzle unlocked only by the most curious of watchers, instead of a common cute catchphrase that's the video store's equivalent of "don't be a dick".
Oh, who am I kidding? Nobody watched that when it was new, let alone in the future.
Furthermore, you'll have to stop that sentence to explain what a video store even was.

I'm going to cut this entry here because I could spend a fortnight typing about words that just don't compute in a purely literal sense anymore.
Proof positive: there were at least two in that sentence.