The crashing magic of sound symbolism

Or, Things That Go Doink in the Night

When our kids were young, the family climbed Mount Isolation, a peak in the White Mountains of New Hampshire. We slogged the long approach through a valley that several days of rain had turned into a gargantuan bowl of muck. I had to search for eight-year-old George’s sneaker after he lost it in the goop. At the end of the day, as we warmed our feet with the car heater, Dorothy Jr. gave the peak a name we still use: Mount Suck.

The family on Mt. Suck, holding up how many of the 48 4,000-foot peaks we thought we had climbed at that point. Only Dorothy Jr. seemed to have a clue.

She wasn’t referring just to the quality of the hike; she also meant the sound our shlepping feet had made. Dorothy had pulled off a nice sound effect for a descriptive label. Linguists have a term for this technique: sound symbolism.

Long before there were words, there were charades. Absent a vocabulary, our human forebears used sounds and gestures to convey threats, warnings, and requests. (We still do this in sex and international diplomacy.) Meanwhile, those early attempts at communication morphed into words that imitate the sounds and gestures.

Listen to the terms we use in describing something horrible and scary; to pronounce them aloud we have to gape in virtual horror.

HORRIBLE!

SCARY!

AWFUL!

OHMYGAWD!

The sounds of words go a long way to convey their emotion and purpose. When you tell a story and want people to feel they’re living it right before their very ears, you can bring in the barking, exploding onomatopoeia. Or, more subtly, you can employ a symbolic mashup of sound and sense. In the old TV series The West Wing, characters noted how frumpy the word “frumpy” seemed. That’s sound symbolism.

“Cute,” on the other hand, sounds sort of cute; and “crisp” makes a crispy sound, unlike the moist “soggy” or “damp.” Or “moist” for that matter. Sound-symbolic word choices make a profound tonal difference. If the lyrics to Dave Matthews’ best song went, “Doink into me,” adolescent passion would turn farcical, if more realistic.

Word sounds can work magic on an audience, even a silent reader. The shape of the mouth while it forms a word—or the unconscious impression of shaping that word—affects the speaker’s cognition and mood. To convey the large and gross, use words that open the audience’s barbaric yawp (a.k.a. Walt Whitman’s gargantuan, American-sized mouth). If you want to make something sound itty-bitty, on the other hand, use the “ih” sound.

While giant slobs suck and chug on flagons of beer,

Fit Betties sip and fiddle tiny demitasses.

Can you “hear” the difference even while reading silently? Petite words make our virtual jaw open just a little, if at all. (No, that’s not a real poem, or a very good one. I just made it up.)

Sound symbolism offers what Robert Frost called the “sound of sense.” He noted that you can parse the intent of what a person is saying in another room even if you can’t understand the individual words. The sound of them—the shape of the words—conveys meaning.

Eeh, ist up isp ritty een.

An ab ine oms ahls arj.

Imagine hearing a couple exchange these lines over the sound of a TV from the apartment next door. Which line seems to convey something small? And which one goes big?

The lines might translate thusly:

Gee, this pup is pretty teeny.

And that kind comes awfully large.

In general, you talk expansively when you employ vowels that open and widen the maw. To restrict the scope of what you’re depicting, use teeth-gritting, tight syllables.

Itty-bitty vowel sounds: ih, eh, ee, uh

Large vowel sounds: oh, ah, eye, ow

Itty-bitty consonants: b, d, t, p, d, k

Large consonants: f, hard g (as in “gargantuan”), l, m

A good poet plays word sounds like wind instruments. Take this famous line from Carl Sandburg’s poem “Fog.”

The fog comes on little cat feet.

“Fog” is big and expansive. “Comes” has a foggy feel. “Little,” “cat,” and “feet” makes tiny, pitty-pat sounds. What a great way to convey the sneaky side of the damp.

Sound symbolism works whenever you want to mix words together and make them seem real. In contrast, to compose a true-to-life poem about a tree, please avoid writing like Joyce Kilmer.

I think that I shall never see

A poem lovely as a tree.

Admittedly, that silly couplet did win Kilmer immortality; but not every effort deserves fame. (How else to explain Ylvis?) If you want to describe a tree, make like a tree and rustle your leaves.

The tree sighs its wish to the breeze.

Yes I’m committing the pathetic fallacy; but the sounds make sense. Please do better in the comments.

Postscript: When I edited the first paragraph to this post, I changed “hiked” to slogged, “sea of mud” to gargantuan bowl of muck, “lost it in the mud” to lost it in the goop, and “sucking sound of our feet” to sound of our shlepping feet. A rewrite is the best time to add sound effects.