Seven Beautiful Words
Designing meanings and reading shapes and writing sounds
What a terrible world, what a beautiful world is a 2015 album by The Decemberists (now playing…) and while writing this post I transpose that phrase: What a terrible word, what a beautiful word.
“Seven Beautiful Words” is an exercise from Natalia Ilyin in her book Writing for the Design Mind. I use this book in the writing-intensive course I teach to visual communication design and photography students. Tomorrow, the students will be assigned to read a couple chapters, and do this exercise on their own. Ilyin simply asks us to come up with seven beautiful words and reflect on that experience.
And that got me thinking: what makes a word beautiful?
Is a word beautiful because it sounds pleasing? Or it because of how it looks when written or typed? Does beauty reside with its speaker or writer, or does it rest with the sparks conjured by our minds when we hear or read it?
‘Cellar door’ is often thought to be a phrase of beauty in the English language, without regard to the actual meaning of the words which, you know, would be ‘basement entrance’ (admittedly, I wasn’t aware of ‘cellar door’ until I watched the movie Donnie Darko). The beauty of the phrase has been noted by authors such as J.R.R. Tolkien, with variations such as Edgar Allen Poe’s ‘nevermore’ and the name of ‘Selidor’ in Ursula K. LeGuin’s Earthsea books. The linking together of aesthetics and sounds is phonaesthetics, and in writing about that, David Crystal ponders many seemingly beautiful words.
Maybe beautiful words are the ones we cannot translate.
Is a beautiful word simply something made of letterforms that we love?
The visual design of words could be a factor. Perhaps it’s about a balance, or asymmetry, of ascenders (part of a lowercase letter that rises above the main body, like a ‘b’) and descenders (the part that drops below, like ‘y’). Tittles (the dots on ‘i’ and ‘j’) in just the right places — ‘tittle’ itself just might be a beautiful word — or the color of the word when we see or think it.
Might it be the curves of a ‘c’ or ‘o’ or ‘e’ next to each other to create just the right slip of white space to savor while casually glancing it over?
Going back to Ilyin’s exercise, it was difficult to choose only seven words, and those that came to mind are sprinkled through this post (‘sprinkle’ — another good one…). Looking back at these, and from a visual standpoint, I see that I find beauty in words that have repeated letters or shapes in them. I also tend to like those that start with ‘s’. The irony is that I had a lisp as a kid.
Tomorrow, my choices could change and honestly, after indulging in a certain sweet treat, I nearly included the word ‘cinnamon’ here.
What seven beautiful words might you choose?
