What Is Phonaesthetic Poetry?

A Bird, came down the Walk

by EMILY DICKINSON (1830-1886)

A Bird, came down the Walk -

He did not know I saw -

He bit an Angle Worm in halves

And ate the fellow, raw,

And then, he drank a Dew

From a convenient Grass -

And then hopped sidewise to the Wall

To let a Beetle pass -

He glanced with rapid eyes,

That hurried all abroad -

They looked like frightened Beads, I thought,

He stirred his Velvet Head. -

Like one in danger, Cautious,

I offered him a Crumb,

And he unrolled his feathers,

And rowed him softer Home -

Than Oars divide the Ocean,

Too silver for a seam,

Or Butterflies, off Banks of Noon,

Leap, plashless as they swim.

Player Piano

by JOHN UPDIKE (x-x)

My stick fingers click with a snicker

And, chuckling, they knuckle the keys;
Light-footed, my steel feelers flicker
And pluck from these keys melodies.

My paper can caper; abandon
Is broadcast by dint of my din,
And no man or band has a hand in
The tones I turn on from within.

At times I’m a jumble of rumbles,
At others I’m light like the moon,
But never my numb plunker fumbles,
Misstrums me, or tires a new tune.

* * * * * * * * * * * *

Phonaesthetics

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Phonaesthetics (in North America, also spelled phonesthetics) is the study of beauty and pleasantness associated with the sounds of certain words or parts of words. The term was first used in this sense, perhaps by J. R. R. Tolkien,^[1] during the mid-twentieth century and derives from the Greek: φωνή (phōnē, "voice-sound") plus the Greek: αἰσθητική (aisthētikē, "aesthetic"). Speech sounds have many aesthetic qualities, some of which are subjectively regarded as euphonious (pleasing) or cacophonous (displeasing). Phonaesthetics remains a budding and often subjective field of study, with no scientifically or otherwise formally established definition; today, it mostly exists as a marginal branch of psychology, phonetics, or poetics.^[2]

More broadly, British linguist David Crystal has regarded phonaesthetics as the study of "phonaesthesia": sound symbolism.^[3] For example, he shows that English speakers tend to associate unpleasantness with the sound sl- in such words as sleazy, slime, slug, and slush,^[4] or they associate repetition lacking any particular shape with -tter in such words as chatter, glitter, flutter, and shatter.^[5]

Contents

• 1Euphony and cacophony
• 2Research
• 3Cellar door
• 4See also
• 5Notes
• 6References

Euphony and cacophony

Euphony is the effect of sounds being perceived as pleasant, rhythmical, lyrical, or harmonious.^[6][7][8] Cacophony is the effect of sounds being perceived as harsh, unpleasant, chaotic, and often discordant; these sounds are perhaps meaningless and jumbled together.^[9] Compare with consonance and dissonance in music. In poetry, for example, euphony may be used deliberately to convey comfort, peace, or serenity, while cacophony may be used to convey discomfort, pain, or disorder. This is often furthered by the combined effect of the meaning beyond just the sounds themselves.

The California Federation of Chaparral Poets, Inc. uses Emily Dickinson's "A Bird Came Down the Walk" as an example of euphonious poetry, one passage being "...Oars divide the Ocean, / Too silver for a seam" and John Updike's "Player Piano" as an example of cacophonous poetry, one passage being "My stick fingers click with a snicker / And, chuckling, they knuckle the keys".^[10]

Research

David Crystal's 1995 paper "Phonaesthetically Speaking" explores lists, created by reader polls and individual writers, of English words that are commonly regarded as sounding beautiful, to search for any patterns within the words' phonetics. Frequently recurring example words in these lists include gossamer, melody, and tranquil. Crystal's findings, assuming a British Received Pronunciation accent, is that words perceived as pretty tend to have a majority of a wide array of criteria; here are some major ones:^[11]

• Three or more syllables (e.g., goss·a·mer and mel·o·dy)
• Stress on the first syllable (e.g., góssamer and mélody)
• /l/ is the most common consonant phoneme, followed by /m, s, n, r, k, t, d/, then a huge drop-off before other consonants (e.g., luminous contains the first four)
• Short vowels (e.g., the schwa, followed in order by the vowels in lid, led, and lad) are favored over long vowels and diphthongs (e.g., as in lied, load, loud)
• Three or more manners of articulation (with approximant consonants the most common, followed by stop consonants, and so on)

A perfect example word, according to these findings, is tremulous. Crystal also suggests the invented words ramelon /ˈræməlɒn/ and drematol /ˈdrɛmətɒl/, which he notes are similar to the types of names often employed in the marketing of pharmaceutical drugs.

Cellar door

The English compound noun cellar door has been widely cited as an example of a word or phrase that is beautiful purely in terms of its sound (i.e., euphony) without regard for its meaning.^[12] The phenomenon of cellar door being regarded as euphonious appears to have begun in the very early twentieth century, first attested in the 1903 novel Gee-Boy by the Shakespeare scholar Cyrus Lauron Hooper. It has been promoted as beautiful-sounding by various writers; linguist Geoffrey Nunberg specifically names the writers H. L. Mencken in 1920; David Allan Robertson in 1921; Dorothy Parker, Hendrik Willem van Loon, and Albert Payson Terhune in the 1930s; George Jean Nathan in 1935; J. R. R. Tolkien as early as a 1955 speech titled "English and Welsh"; and C.S. Lewis in 1963.^[12][13] Furthermore, the phenomenon itself is touched upon in many sources and media, including a 1905 issue of Harper's Magazine by William Dean Howells,^[a] the 1967 novel Why Are We in Vietnam? by Norman Mailer, a 1991 essay by Jacques Barzun,^[15], the 2001 psychological drama film Donnie Darko,^[16][17] and even discussed in a scene in the 2019 movie Tolkien.

The origin of cellar door being considered as an inherently beautiful or musical word is mysterious. However, in 2014, Nunberg speculated that the phenomenon might have arisen from Philip Wingate and Henry W. Petrie's 1894 hit song "I Don't Want to Play in Your Yard", which contains the lyric "You'll be sorry when you see me sliding down our cellar door". Following the song's success, "slide down my cellar door" became a popular catchphrase up until the 1930s or 1940s to mean engaging in a type of friendship or camaraderie reminiscent of childhood innocence.^[18][b] A 1914 essay about Edgar Allan Poe's choice of the word "Nevermore" in his 1845 poem "The Raven" as being based on euphony may have spawned an unverified legend, propagated by syndicated columnists like Frank Colby in 1949^[21] and L. M. Boyd in 1979, that cellar door was Poe's favorite phrase.^[22]

Tolkien, Lewis, and others have suggested that cellar door's auditory beauty becomes more apparent the more the word is dissociated from its literal meaning, for example, by using alternative spellings such as Selador or Selladore, which take on the quality of an enchanting name (and both of which suggest a specifically British pronunciation of the word: /sɛlədɔː/).^[13][c][d]

See also

Look up phonaesthetics in Wiktionary, the free dictionary.

• Affection (linguistics)
• Assimilation (linguistics)
• Dissimilation
• Epenthesis
• Inherently funny word
• Japanese sound symbolism
• Onomatopoeia
• Phonestheme
• Phonosemantics
• Sandhi ("euphonic" rules in Sanskrit grammar)
• Vogon poetry
• Vowel harmony

Notes

1. ^ Howells attributes to a "courtly Spaniard" the quote, "Your language too has soft and beautiful words, but they are not always appreciated. What could be more musical than your word cellar-door?"^[14]
2. ^ Nunberg identifies "Playmates" as an earlier song from which "I Don't Want to Play in Your Yard" was derived; in fact the derivation is the reverse.^[19][20]
3. ^ In a 1966 interview, Tolkien said: "Supposing you say some quite ordinary words to me—'cellar door', say. From that, I might think of a name 'Selador', and from that a character, a situation begins to grow".^[23]
4. ^ Most English-speaking people ... will admit that cellar door is 'beautiful', especially if dissociated from its sense (and from its spelling). More beautiful than, say, sky, and far more beautiful than beautiful. Well then, in Welsh for me cellar doors [i.e. such beautiful words] are extraordinarily frequent, and moving to the higher dimension, the words in which there is pleasure in the contemplation of the association of form and sense are abundant.^[24]

References

• Smith, Ross (2007). Inside Language: Linguistic and Aesthetic Theory in Tolkien. Walking Tree Publishers. ISBN 978-3-905703-06-1.

1. ^ Holmes, John R. (2010) "'Inside a Song': Tolkien's Phonaesthetics". In: Eden, Bradford Lee (ed.). Middle-earth Minstrel. McFarland. p. 30
2. ^ Shisler, Benjamin K. (1997). [www.oocities.org/soho/studios/9783/phonpap1.html Phonesthetics]". The Influence of Phonesthesia on the English Language.
3. ^ Crystal, David (2011). A Dictionary of Linguistics and Phonetics. John Wiley & Sons. p. 364. ISBN 9781444356755.
4. ^ Crystal, David (2001). A Dictionary of Language. University of Chicago Press. p. 260. ISBN 9780226122038.
5. ^ Allan, Keith (2014). "Phonesthesia". Linguistic Meaning. Routledge Library Editions: Linguistics.
6. ^ "CACOPHONY, Literary Terms and Definition by Carson-Newman University". Retrieved 2013-09-10.
7. ^ "Definition of Cacophony". Retrieved 2013-09-10.
8. ^ Elizabeth, Mary; Podhaizer, Mary Elizabeth (2001). "Euphony". Painless Poetry. Barron's Educational Series. ISBN 978-0-7641-1614-8.
9. ^ "Cacophony". Dictionary.com. Retrieved 26 July 2015.
10. ^ "Poetic Devices" (PDF). chaparralpoets.org. Retrieved 12 April 2017.
11. ^ Crystal, David (1995). "Phonaesthetically Speaking". English Today42.2 (April): 8–12. Cambridge University Press.
12. ^ Jump up to:^a b Barrett, Grant (14 February 2010). "On Language: Cellar Door". New York Times Magazine. p. 16.
13. ^ Jump up to:^a b Nunberg, Geoff (26 February 2010). "The Romantic Side of Familiar Words". Language Log. Retrieved 27 February 2010.
14. ^ Howells, William Dean (March 1905). "Editor's easy chair". Harper's Magazine: 645.
15. ^ Jacques Barzun, An Essay on French Verse for Readers of English Poetry (New Directions, 1991). ISBN 0-8112-1157-6: "I discovered its illusory character when many years ago a Japanese friend with whom I often discussed literature told me that to him and some of his English-speaking friends the most beautiful word in our language was 'cellardoor'. It was not beautiful to me and I wondered where its evocative power lay for the Japanese. Was it because they find l and r difficult to pronounce, and the word thus acquires remoteness and enchantment? I asked, and learned also that Tatsuo Sakuma, my friend, had never seen an American cellar door, either inside a house or outside — the usual two flaps on a sloping ledge. No doubt that lack of visual familiarity added to the word’s appeal. He also enjoyed going to restaurants and hearing the waiter ask if he would like salad or roast vegetables, because again the phrase 'salad or' could be heard. I concluded that its charmlessness to speakers of English lay simply in its meaning. It has the l and r sounds and d and long o dear to the analysts of verse music, but it is prosaic. Compare it with 'celandine', where the image of the flower at once makes the sound lovely."
16. ^ Kois, Dan (23 July 2003). "Everything you were afraid to ask about "Donnie Darko"". Slate.
17. ^ Ross Smith, Inside Language, Walking Tree Publishers (2007), p. 65)
18. ^ Nunberg, Geoff (16 March 2014). "Slide down my cellar door". Language Log. Retrieved 21 March 2014.
19. ^ Nunberg, Geoff (17 March 2014). "GN response to comment by "Emma"". Language Log. Retrieved 21 March 2014.
20. ^ Lovelace, Melba (15 July 1989). "Words to "Playmates" Song Stir Up Controversy". News OK. Retrieved 21 March 2014.
21. ^ Colby, Frank (3 November 1949). "Take My Word For It". Miami Daily News. p. 45. Retrieved 1 March 2010.
22. ^ Boyd, Louis M. (15 January 1979). "Quoth the raven "cellar door"?". Reading Eagle. Reading, Pennsylvania. p. 5. Retrieved 27 February 2010.
23. ^ Zaleski, Philip; Zaleski, Carol (2015). The Fellowship: The Literary Lives of the Inklings: J.R.R. Tolkien, C. S. Lewis, Owen Barfield, Charles Williams. New York: Farrar Straus and Giroux. p. 25. ISBN 978-0-374-15409-7.
24. ^ Tolkien, J. R. R. (1964). Angles and Britons. University of Wales Press. p. 36.

* * * * * * * * * * * *

MARIO Aug 2018

Always And Forever

Cellar door, nevermore

That’s all I have to say

A rattle in Seattle

The normal day to day.

Cried today, shied away

You’ll never learn that way

Boys slay, girls sashay

But you can’t make them stay.

Shoes that walk, clothes that talk

That’s how much you weigh

I’d rather sleep all day

Than live life that way.

* * * * * * * * * * * *

Aa Harvey Jun 2018

Cellar Door

Cellar Door

The word cellar door, may paint a cold, dark image,

But the two words together, are simply magnificent.

They roll off the tongue, like a red silk carpet

And when you find something so beautiful,

You should not forget it.

For cellar door, I simply adore,

For it's a connection of words, that are simply beautiful.

Two words together, that when spelt right have a meaning,

But when they are separated and you see them differently,

You are able to see, why they contradict each other;

For cell keeps us trapped, we can't run free from this evil,

But to adore is to love, the purest of feelings;

The thing that can't be beaten, with an English Dictionary,

Or a thoughtless, harsh word, from a fool in the audience,

Who will never see or hold such beauty,

For they truly are ignorant.

These thoughts are my own;

But I was inspired to write this poem.

If you missed Donnie Darko

And don't know where I got this inspiration,

A teacher with passion, spoke the words cellar door

And explained they were her, two favorite words of all.

So remember cellar door, for it simply means love;

Don't let them lock away your feelings, behind a cell door

And keep them buried, so no one can see your love show.

Don't hide from your feelings, for it will serve you no good.

Will you choose to be trapped inside your cell?

Or applaud me, for I saw what is plain to see

And I am willing to tell.

Cellar door sounds fantastic and when it is spoken by a lover,

You shall see its true meaning, simply means I love you forever.

Together we are happily trapped, in this notion called love,

But we are free to be free,

For we have the key to this cellar door.

(C)2013 Aa Harvey. All Rights Reserved.

* * * * * * * * * * * *

Parker A Blackwood Dec 2015

Cellar Door

CeLlAr DoOr

cElLaR dOoR

cELLAR dOOR

cellar door

Cellar Door:

The most beautiful comprised set of words in the English dictionary

Why?

It could be the similar endings or how the shapes of the C and D are parallel

It could be the double letters in each word that are located right in the middle of both

Yet it could also be the way it, so easily, slides up your throat and escapes you mouth while it still ruminates on the tip of your tongue

But I personally believe it is not the letters or the sounds

It is the mystery of that one "Cellar Door"

What lies behind the "Cellar Door"?

Where does this "Cellar Door" lead to?

Can you imagine the beauty of this "Cellar Door"?

The perfection of this word is that of which the eyes cannot see and the ears cannot hear.

* * * * * * * * * * * *

Black and white photo of the cast of "Monty Python and the Holy Grail." |  Archive Photos / Getty Images

Phonaesthetics (Word Sounds)

https://www.thoughtco.com/phonaesthetics-word-sounds-1691471

By Richard Nordquist

Updated July 03, 2019

In language studies, phonaesthetics is the study of the positive (euphonious) and negative (cacophonous) sounds of letters, words, and combinations of letters and words. Also spelled phonesthetics.  

Linguist David Crystal defines phonaesthetics as "the study of the aesthetic properties of sound, especially the sound symbolism attributable to individual sounds, sound clusters or sound types. Examples include the implication of smallness in the close vowels of such words as teeny weeny, and the unpleasant associations of the consonant cluster /sl-/ in such words as slime, slug and slush"

(A Dictionary of Language, 2001).

Etymology

From the Greek phōnē+aisthētikē, "voice-sound" + "aesthetics

Examples and Observations

Sound Quality (Timbre)

"We speak of words as soft, smooth,  rough, sonorous, harsh, guttural, explosive. About individual words not much can be said--even about 'cellar-door,' which is reputed to be one of the most beautiful-sounding words in our language. With a sequence of words, especially one that shapes itself into a meaningful sentence or line of verse, the sound becomes more determinate and controlled.

The still, sad music of humanity

(Wordsworth, 'Lines Composed a Few Miles Above Tintern Abbey')

naturally calls for a grave and quiet reading.  The sound-quality of a discourse is, then, a regional quality that depends in part upon the qualities of its words and also upon [sound-similarity and sound-pattern]."

(Monroe C. Beardsley, Aesthetics: Problems in the Philosophy of Criticism, 2nd ed. Hackett, 1981)

Phonaesthetics and the Adopted Names of Actors

"Quite a few actors have changed their names simply because they didn't like the one they already had...

"There is a tendency for men to avoid gentle continuant sounds, such as m and l, when looking for new names, and to go in for the hard-sounding 'plosive' consonants, such as k and g. Maurice Micklewhite became Michael Caine, Marion Michael Morrison became John Wayne, Alexander Archibald Leach became Cary Grant, Julius Ullman became Douglas Fairbanks.

"Women tend to go the other way. Dorothy Kaumeyer became Dorothy Lamour. Hedwig Kiesler became Hedy Lamarr. Norma Jean Baker became Marilyn Monroe.

"Actually, Roy Rogers is a bit weak, compared with most cowboy names. Cowboys tend to be full of plosives and short vowels--Bill, Bob, Buck, Chuck, Clint, Jack, Jim, Like, Tex, Tom, Billy the Kid, Buffalo Bill, Wild Bill Hickok, Kit Carson. Roy doesn't quite explode from the lips in the same way. His horse, Trigger, actually does rather better.

"These are only tendencies, of course. There are plenty of exceptions."

(David Crystal, By Hook or by Crook: A Journey in Search of English. Overlook Press, 2008)

Phonaesthetics and Nicknames

"[N]icknames incorporate more pleasant and gentle sounds than full names for both men and women. One reason for this is the [i:] ending characteristic of so many nicknames (Nicky, Billy, Jenny, Peggy). Crystal (1993) noted the distinctly masculine characteristics of the nickname Bob. Bob is easy for children to pronounce because its repeated , [b], is mastered early (Whissell 2003b). Phonaesthetically, [b] is an unpleasant sound and the central vowel of the name is active and cheerful. Bob is, therefore, a prototypical masculine nickname, both in terms of the phonaesthetic system employed here and in terms of Crystal's criteria. DeKlerk and Bosch (1997) argue for the importance of phonaesthetics in the assignment of nicknames, and point to the positive social intent of name-givers as a main concomitant of this assignment."​ 

(Cynthia Whissell, "Choosing a Name: How Name-Givers' Feelings Influence Their Selections." The Oxford Handbook of the Word, ed. John R. Taylor. Oxford University Press, 2015)

Phonesthesia and Brand Names

"The loose association of phonesthesia, applied to bigger chunks of sound, are ... the source of an unignorable trend in brand names ...​

"Previously, companies named their brands after their founders (Ford, Edison, Westinghouse), or with a descriptor that conveyed their immensity (General Motors, United Airlines, U.S. Steel), or by a portmanteau that identified a new technology (Microsoft, Instamatic, Polavision), or with a metaphor or metonym connoting a quality they wished to ascribe (Impala, Newport, Princess, Trailblazer, Rebel). But today they seek to convey a je ne sais quoi using faux-Greek and Latinate neologisms built out of word fragments that are supposed to connote certain qualities without allowing people to put their finger on what they are. . . . Acura--accurate? acute? What does that have to do with a car? Verizon--a veritable horizon? Does it mean that good phone service will recede into the distance forever? Viagra--virility? vigor? viable? Are we supposed to think it will make a man ejaculate like Niagara Falls? The most egregious example is the renaming of the Philip Morris parent company as Altria, presumably to switch its image from bad people who sell addictive carcinogens to a place or state marked by altruism and other lofty values." 

(Steven Pinker, The Stuff of Thought: Language as a Window Into Human Nature. Viking, 2007)

-----

"Certainly, euphony should be a consideration in choosing a brand name. Lamolay sounds better than Tarytak for a toilet paper even though it has the same number of letters." 

(John O'Shaughnessy, Consumer Behaviour: Perspectives, Findings and Explanations. Palgrave Macmillan, 2013)

Sound and Sense

"[T]he poet ... knows when the sound is carrying his sense, even if he doesn't know why. In creating his names and his verse, [J. R. R.] Tolkien was exercising both skills, in pursuit of what he called 'phonaesthetic pleasure' (Letters 176).

"To illustrate, let's turn back to our abandoned palato-velars. The phonaesthetics of the post-liquid palato-velar is a thing of beauty. It captured the heart of a young Texas poet with the unlikely name of Tom Jones when he was in college, and he filled a whole song with them, which became the opening song of The Fantasticks, the longest running musical in the history of the New York stage. The song was called 'Try to Remember.' The refrain was the single word we have looked at in its transformation from Old to Modern English: follow, follow, follow. In each stanza Jones crammed as many of the mutated-liquid words he could: first mellow, yellow, fellow, then willow, pillow, billow, and then follow and hollow, finally ending where the song began with mellow. . . .

Try to Remember - The Fantasticks

(2006 Original Soundtrack)

"Tolkien does not incorporate quite so many of these mutated palatovelar words in any one place, but the mention of the word willow should signal to any Tolkien reader where I am going next: to the old Willowman of The Adventures of Tom Bombadil and 'The Old Forest' chapter of The Lord of the Rings ..."

(John R. Holmes, "'Inside a Song': Tolkien's Phonaesthetics." Middle-Earth Minstrel: Essays on Music in Tolkien, ed. by Bradford Lee Eden. McFarland, 2010) 

Old Man Willow was a willow in the Old Forest standing near Withywindle.

He might have been an Ent who had become tree-like, or possibly a Huorn, as the Old Forest was originally part of the same primordial forest as Fangorn.

The Great Willow was evil-hearted and from it much of the Forest's hatred of walking things came. Despite his power, Tom Bombadil, who called him Old grey Willow-man, had power over him, and checked the evil as much as he could, or was willing.

Old Man Willow cast a spell on the hobbits (Frodo, Sam, Merry and Pippin), causing them to feel sleepy. Merry and Pippin leaned against the trunk and fell asleep, while Frodo sat on a root to dangle his feet in the water, before also falling asleep. The tree trapped Merry and Pippin in cracks in the trunk, and tipped Frodo into the stream.

Sam managed to fight off the spell and rescued Frodo from the stream. Together they attempted to save Merry and Pippin by lighting a fire at the tree's base, but this only served to infuriate Old Man Willow, who threatened to kill the trapped hobbits. They were saved by the timely arrival of Tom Bombadil who knew "the tune for him".

In the poem The Adventures of Tom Bombadil, Old Man Willow sings Tom Bombadil to sleep and traps him in a crack. He then speaks to Tom, chastising him for spying on him and tickling him with his feather. Tom orders Old Man Willow to release him, which he does immediately.

An Alternative View: Noisiness

"Many of those who have written about the topics of iconicity, sound symbolism, phonaesthetics and phonosemantics write as though to unfold the latent surplus of meaning contained in certain sounds, letters or groups of letters. But iconic language is in the literal sense idiotic, speaking the idiom of the blindly singular, of purely accidental and idiomatic noise. It may well be that certain clusters of sounds seem charged with certain kinds of meaningfulness-- i seems to connote littleness, gl- seems to be associated with light, and gr- with irascibility-- but the way these sounds work is by first signifying, not particular sound-qualities, but an abstract quality of noisiness as such--the sound of just sounding."

(Steven Connor, Beyond Words: Sobs, Hums, Stutters and Other Vocalizations. Reaktion Books, 2014)   

Monty Python and the Lighter Side of Phonaesthetics

"When the Pythons are not making words and names take on new meanings, they are likely commenting upon the inherent qualities of words themselves. One fine example appears in the 'Woody and Tinny Words' sketch (ep. 42), in which an upper-middle-class family voice their opinions regarding the pleasure (or displeasure) derived simply from saying and hearing various words. For fun, try to see which of the following words sound woody (confidence building!) and which sound tinny (dreadful):

SET ONE: gorn, sausage, caribou, intercourse, pert, thighs, botty, erogenous, zone, concubine, loose women, ocelot, wasp, yowling

SET TWO: newspaper, litterbin, tin, antelope, seemly, prodding, vacuum, leap, bound, vole, recidivist, tit, Simkins*

"The euphony or cacophony of words (what the Oxbridge scholars in Python--and probably Gilliam, too, why not?--would have known as phonaesthetics, the study of positive and negative sounds in human speech) may lead users to project certain connotations upon individual words (Crystal, 1995, 8-12). Such phonaesthetic connotative projection devolves, in this skit, into a practically visible form of mental masturbation, wherein the father (Chapman) must be doused with a bucket of water to be calmed down after cogitating upon too many 'woody sounding' words. As he sagely notes, ' ... it's a funny thing ... all the naughty words sound woody.' It's a theory not entirely without justification (the understanding of how linguistic connotations are often derived from sounds, not the masturbatory powers of individual words! Bloody pervert.)

"* Answer key: set one = woody: set two = tinny"

(Brian Cogan and Jeff Massey, Everything I Ever Needed to Know About _____ I Learned From Monty Python. Thomas Dunne Books, 2014)