The On Language column in the New York Times magazine last Sunday was devoted to the most beautiful words in English, and it focused on the surprising frequency with which "cellar door" gets cited.
Cellar door has a mellifluous ring, but as an exquisite phrase it's like the beautiful girl with nothing upstairs. All it has going for it is sound. Summer afternoon - which Henry James claimed were the most beautiful words in the English language - is better, for its mixture of pleasing sounds (at least with the first word) and pleasant evocations.
When James Lipton asks an actor for his or her favorite word, the answer is often based entirely on meaning (making it the opposite of cellar door). "Tolerance," he'll hear. Or "Harmony." Interesting that no one has ever said "Oscar."
My favorite word has both a beautiful sound (at least to me) and a candlelit association. When I first heard it as a child I was enchanted (I still am) by the magical way that it takes one word and turns it seamlessly into another: evensong.
It's nice having your article in a magazine, but it's even nicer having your name on the cover - especially when it's joined by that of one of your favorite writers. In the current issue of The Wilson Quarterly you can read Richard Rodriguez on Cesar Chavez and your humble blogger on the misunderstood workings and the underappreciated triumphs of travel writers.
This weekend I went to write about a luxury resort in the Keys. The landscaping was lush, the grounds were immaculate. Racks of spotless shirts and trousers hung in the gift shop. Guests, ample and prosperous, lounged by the pool or drank at the tiki bar. Nearby, a man-made waterfall splashed into a lagoon. In the evening families sat at candlelit tables overlooking the ocean, trying to decide between the fish for $32 or the steak for $55. And then what for dessert? It took a great deal of effort to imagine, a couple hundred miles across that water, the tragedy in Haiti.
When you're a travel writer it's a given that your job occasionally strikes you as trivial. This weekend it seemed worse than that.
My travel writing class is back, meeting informally once a week. Last night Hilary read a lovely piece about vicarious travel, looking at the books she read in order to dream and the souvenirs she saved in order to remember. Among her memories was a childhood flight to Dakar. Roland described passengers on a flight from Miami to San Francisco in great detail and with equal honesty, and then teased us by saying that for the next class he will write about his stay at Esalen. Blanca arrived late, saying she had just heard on the radio about an earthquake in Haiti. She read a beautiful poem about visiting her old hometown of New Orleans. (She found, among other things, the old taffy truck.) Sparked by Roland's story, she told of visiting Berkeley with her parents in 1968 - receiving flyers from Black Panthers as they walked down the street - and then a European trip with them using as a guidebook Europe on $5 a Day. (I told her that what Dr. Spock was to child rearing in the '50s, and Alfred Kinsey was to sex, Arthur Frommer was to travel.) To end the evening Roland's cousin, visiting from Germany, told of volunteering as a physical therapist in Yemen.
I challenge any memoir writing teacher to top that.
Yesterday, the first working day of the year, I received a rejection from a publisher, a cryptic message from one editor and the silent treatment from another. I also experienced computer problems; the only way I could send an e-mail was to log off of e-mail. Still, through it all I wrote a humor column. It was the writer's equivalent of playing with pain.
My friend Alan Behr, an excellent writer and critic, writes: "English is the most powerful language on earth. Americans are born with a race car of a language and almost never pop it out of 1st gear - and they ignore or resent like hell anyone who does."
Journalism is partly to blame. Writing for newspapers, you were never supposed to use a word that readers would have to look up. Now the Internet, with its obsession with information, has further impoverished the language, even as it provides instant access to the meanings of unfamiliar words.