Euphonies: The Playground of Language

Cellar Door

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Every so often, reading a book or listening to music, I encounter a phrase that seems to accomplish the purpose of the English language all by itself. Perhaps you’ve experienced this too, the sensation wherein a sentence just nails the music of what English is trying to do, or trying to be. People have obsessed over this phenomenon for quite some time with our language, the prime example the euphony “cellar door” by so many language scholars and fans of Donny Darko.

Let me give you a few examples. Most recently, I came across a gem as I was reading James Joyce’s inscrutable masterpiece Finnegan’s Wake (a book whose central project seems to be figuring out what the heck the English language is). In Book II Section 3, you’ll come across this deliciously fun phrase: “...boof for for booby, boo; new uses in their mewseyfume.” There’s nothing that I can say to explain why this feels like the essence of English to me. Sure, the rhythm and the consonance help, but the best testament to the success of a phrase like that is just to read it out loud. It’ll be fun, trust me.

Here’s another one from Finnegan’s Wake: “His Thing Mod have undone him: and his madthing has done him man.” I don’t know what this sentence means. You also don’t know what this sentence means. Yet, somehow, like the earlier sentence, when I read it out loud, there is a different kind of understanding going on, one that recognizes what’s happening as a distillation of language. It’s a kind of spell.