Touch comes before sight, before speech. It is the first language and the last, and it always tells the truth.
—Margaret Atwood
English vocabulary is full of abstractions and generalizations, yet there is a scarcity of words that relate to the senses. Do you know the sound equivalent of the word visualize? A word for this wasn’t invented until 1975, when someone finally came up with aurelate—which hasn’t caught on and is still not recognized by my spell checker.
What if we could come up with a word like visualize for imagining the feel of something? The taste? The smell? I vote that we add some new words—tactillate (imagine the feel), aromize, and savorize—and start using them to imagine with our senses.
But why do we need these imaginary-sense words? Why visualize when you can explain? Because visualizing lets you see with your senses, even when your eyes can’t. We visualize how a fireplace or a paint color will look in our living room when we’re staring at a blank wall, or we aurelate what we are going to say to someone before we meet him.
In a guided meditation, you could say you see the light coming out of your head and you can feel the energy flowing to your fingertips. However, to stay connected to the present, it helps to distinguish between what sensations you use your imagination to create as opposed to those from the physical world. Remember the I notice versus I imagine distinction in the previous chapter. Your brain may not distinguish real from imaginary, but forcing yourself to make that distinction in your speech will help you stay present and connect with others. These visualize equivalents for the other four senses help make that distinction clear.
Imagine the…
1. sight—visualize
2. sound—aurelate
3. touch—tactillate
4. smell—aromize
5. taste—savorize
But for the strongest connections of all, we need to ditch our imaginations for our senses.
Our senses do more than anything else to connect us to the present moment and to each other, so it makes sense to keep our words connected to our senses:
I hear you.
I see you.
I smell you.
I feel you.
I taste you.
See how easy it is to get excited when we connect our language to our senses? It also keeps us grounded and present, out of our minds in the best possible way. See was the most frequently used word for elementary school SLPs in my study, and that makes sense: Children learn to be themselves using their senses before they learn all the abstractions that disconnect them from their senses. “See the bird? I see it!” Elementary school SLPs are more exposed to the sensory words and therefore use them more than their middle school counterparts. I also wager that elementary school teachers are—on average—happier than middle school teachers.
There is no substitute for sensory experience when it comes to connecting well: “This fish sauce tastes sweet. Your hand feels warmer than mine. I smell your perfume from over here. I hear the music coming out of your headphones. I see your pupils getting bigger.” These types of sentences come about only when we pay attention, when we notice what’s happening now. Talking like this is its own meditation. When I pay attention to what someone says—not just the words, but the sounds coming out of a person’s mouth—even over the phone, I feel grounded, present, and connected. Sometimes the conversation turns into a conversation about how the other person speaks. This happens with my friend Lacie, whom I talk to over the phone because she lives in Detroit. Of all my friends, she is the one I seem to have the most connected phone conversations with, no matter what we talk about. Often, the subject of our conversation is a specific word—I notice that she often uses the words should and always—or the pronunciation differences between us. When a word-trash word becomes the subject of a conversation, rather than a bad habit in that conversation, you will find connection.
I encourage you to have conversations about all the words discussed in part one, because the more we talk about those words (rather than use them out of habit), the more aware of them we will be, the more primed to notice their effects, and the more empowered to switch them off (rather than them switching our conversations off). This is the practice of talking with your senses rather than your ego. And it’s your senses that reward you with pleasure. Anyone for chocolate?
Merriam-Webster defines euphony as:
pleasing or sweet sound; especially: the acoustic effect produced by words so formed or combined as to please the ear.
There’s another reason I like the phone conversations with Lacie, and it’s not only because she has a soft, warm, American accent. I like that the words she uses sound pleasant, i.e., they bring pleasure, a little aural chocolate—or ear candy, if you don’t eat chocolate. One of my favorite aural chocolates that Lacie offers me is the word darn.
Me: My coffee machine is broken.
Lacie: Darn.
Other authors have their favorite cinnamon words that appear in at least half of their books. Ben Blatt documents a list of cinnamon words for many well-known writers in his book Nabokov’s Favorite Word Is Mauve. (Vladimir Vladimirovich Nabokov was a Russian-born American novelist.) The term cinnamon word was coined after author Ray Bradbury’s favorite word (cinnamon is also a cinnamon word of authors Toni Morrison and Khaled Hosseini). J. K. Rowling’s cinnamon words include wand, wizard, and potion. Dorm is a cinnamon word for several female authors, including Alice Sebold, especially because it sounds warm. The closing, nasal vibration of m is also found in the sound of om, used in meditation. Indeed, paying attention to one or two cinnamon words that center you and make you feel present offers some of the same benefits as meditation.
Words that are a pleasure to listen to help us connect. Yes, this means that if you are fond of a certain accent, it is possible that you will derive more aural pleasure—I said aural—and resulting connection from talking to some people more than others. I know what an aural crush feels like. I thought I was falling in love with someone over the phone because of her words, but when we finally met in person and added the visual and touch senses, we lacked a full connection. And the relationship went no further.
The good news is that if people aren’t beautiful enough for your sensory stimulation, words can be. Linguist Robert Beard, the founder of Yourdictionary.com and alphadictionary.com, wrote a book titled The 100 Most Beautiful Words in English. For him (I am summarizing), the beauty of a word is found in the rhythm derived from the emphasis of syllables within that word: “Each [beautiful] word has an accented syllable that stands out from the unaccented ones.” Most of the 100 words in his list contain more than one syllable—and he’s not including my darn, darn it. If words were people, accented syllables would be the jawlines, cheekbones, eyes, and mouths of the beautiful. Beard also mentions that words with many vowels can be “lovelier” because they involve unobstructed airflow and rounded lips. He suggests that the amount of lip action a word requires may correlate with how beautiful the word is “because the lips are so involved in expressing love.”
Here’s a teaser of five of the words that made his list:
1. Ailurophile: A cat-lover
2. Assemblage: A gathering
3. Becoming: Attractive
4. Bucolic: In a lovely rural setting
5. Dalliance: A brief love affair
I recommend that you say all 100 of his most beautiful words (also published on his website1) out loud and feel which ones involve the most lip action. I got a little excited writing that. You’re welcome…
Rodrigo Niño used the second word in Beard’s list in 2017 when he founded the coworking-space company The Assemblage, a name that is as enticing as it is evocative. If Niño had called it The Assembly, I imagine it wouldn’t have had as much of a draw. I have visited The Assemblage, and the beauty of its name is reflected in the beauty of the building’s interior and in its decorations, paintings, and ornaments.
But we don’t all have Rodrigo Niño’s talent for using beautiful words: The New York SLPs’ usage of a sample of the words in the list was almost nonexistent (their average score was 4.61 on a scale of 1 to 5, with 5 being not at all). It seems there is an opportunity once again for beauty in our words, something Shakespeare understood. Beauty or not beauty—that is the question. So how about we try to find the connection to the evocative and the onomatopoeia. Pick one or two words at a time from Beard’s list of beautiful words. If you love them, keep them and use them to connect. With a little attention, you’ll discover opportunities to connect that you didn’t know existed. Serendipity, see?
Yes, there are some adjectives in the list, but a commonality of these 100 words is that they are specific—not your average good or bad descriptors. There’s another word I would like to add to this list. I am convinced that it is a word that has made a food item popular—especially in New York—only because of its name. I imagine that if this food item went by the name rhododendron, it would be about as popular as seaweed, not even close to ceviche, and a universe away from sushi. What am I talking about? The rise of the poke (pronounced poh-KAY) bowl. Poke (not a Facebook notification) used to be a word and food found mostly in Hawaii. But in 2016, poke went from word to buzzword to having its own brand. Poke is only poke because the word became cool. It’s raw fish with sesame oil and salad. You could describe it as sesame-sashimi salad. But Hawaiians and Japanese call it poke, and people like to poke.
Data from Google Trends shows how fresh this word popularity is: Searches have been climbing since the beginning of 2016, and Google’s relative interest score for poke bowl went from only 15 in January 2016 spiking to 100 only a few months later in July.
Another word that has done this to a lesser degree is the Brazilian açai (pronounced AH-SIGH-EE). (Again followed by the word bowl—perhaps the word bowl is also not to be underestimated.)
“Let’s do another bowl, dude.”
“Yeah, poke.”
“That poke is dope.”
“That’s açai, man.”
Ah, remember, is the easiest sound infants (and adults) can make while relaxing the mouth. It’s the soothing sound of mouth relaxation.
And do people enjoy smoking shisha pipes or do they just like saying the word shisha so much that they can’t resist putting it in their mouth?
The word itself is one of Beard’s beautiful words, but it also defines words that immediately create connection through sound. Vocalizing onomatopoeia is free cognitive behavioral therapy. A common CBT exercise is to have you pay attention to five sounds you can hear now. Vocalizing onomatopoeia both creates and shifts attention to the sounds. The sound is the meaning. No ambiguity. So, crack your fingers, listen to the thud as you drop your books on the rug, and ring the bell. Merriam-Webster defines onomatopoeia as follows:
the naming of a thing or action by a vocal imitation of the sound associated with it (such as buzz, hiss); the use of words whose sound suggests the sense.
Beep beep. Takes me back to living in India, where truck owners paint the words sound OK Horn on the backs of their trucks to request that other vehicles notify them of their presence. The request is unnecessary. Almost all drivers, from rickshaws to roadsters, beep every few seconds to notify everyone nearby that they are on the road. If you don’t understand why, then I recommend some international travel.
What follows is a list of onomatopoeia that can probably be understood wherever you are in the world (for an extensive and evolving list, have a look at the Wikipedia entry on CROSS-LINGUISTIC ONOMATOPOEIA). With the exception of haha, most of the words on this list are not used at all by the New York SLPs (average 4.46). That implies daily missed opportunities for connection—probably missed because their egos perceive the words as childish. But children are often better at connecting than adults. When a sound communicates what a (non-onomatopoeic) word cannot—such as the beep beep of car horns (as opposed to the sounding of car horns), use the sound, and you will evoke what people can understand with their senses, not just their minds. This has the effect of grounding you both in the present, even if the word itself does not have other meanings or uses. Think about the om sound in meditation. (also found in the increasingly popular, omakase). It doesn’t have wide conversational use, but it still connects people to the present when it is used because of how it vibrates in the body. The next time you are stuck for conversation at a party, try forming a sentence with one of the following, and pay attention to how engaged your conversation partner becomes:
Count how many bangs you hear today (sounds, not words). The most frequent bangs I hear are from people letting their apartment doors slam. Sometimes I hear bangs that sound like gunshots, but they’re from a Dumpster being dropped on the street. And sometimes the bangs are fireworks going off. Many things—and people—bang. Remember that the next time you bang into something or hear the drums in a song. “Do you hear her banging those drums?”
We’re banging more than we used to. That’s healthy!
Not the easiest word to work into a sentence at your party, but not impossible: “I miss hearing the sound of cows mooing when we stayed next door to the dairy farm.” Instead of an insipid “I miss hearing the sound of the cows…”
“Our son loves to rev up our car outside our house before he drives anywhere. Vroom, vroom, vroom.”
True, a real-life glug often sounds more like an ug than a glug, but a glug says far more than drink, and it brings the attention to the throat and makes the conversation visceral, not just mental.
Hummingbirds hum. Washing machines, air conditioners, and dishwashers hum, but people don’t articulate this sound often, and when they do it’s often as a typo version of hmmm. Not a lot of hum in our speech, hmmm?
Noise is nonspecific and abstract, but it’s often used instead of the word hum, which gives you the sound as you communicate it. No need to aurelate when you can hear it.
Tick-tock is the sound of the clock, and it’s often used to quickly communicate that time is running out for the recipient of a communication. Saying it makes you conscious of time, just as a metronome would (and a metronome also tick-tocks).
If you are trying to describe the sound made by the canons that fire across the harbor every night in Havana, why describe that with several words when you can boom in one?
Who says, “The cat was making a sound typical of cats?”
Click your mouse button now and listen to the sound. The keys on my laptop are the shallow/thin ones that click more than the laptop keys that stick out more (that you tap).
And rap rap (Danish); mak-mak (Albanian); prääk prääk (Estonian); coin coin (French); háp háp (Hungarian); bra bra (Icelandic); qua qua (Italian).
You know ducks are around without having to say they are.
Beep beep was the sound heard on almost every Mumbai street.
My first reaction to Nom nom was that it was just millennial cool talk. Something the hot, too-popular-for-me girl would comment on Instagram under an image of the poke bowl she bought more with the intention of photographing than eating. But no no, nom nom sounds close to the noise I make when I am showing appreciation for delicious food without opening my mouth as I chew on it. Evocative it is.
In an article for Eater.com, Dana Hatic explains how it became a written word: “Classified as ‘an onomatopoeic adjective,’ nom is taken from the larger phrase om nom nom, based on Cookie Monster’s happy eating sounds. [Cookie Monster is a character in the American (children’s) TV series, Sesame Street.] It was first defined on Urban Dictionary in 2004. It can be ascribed to something a person wants to eat (‘Wanna go get some noms?’), a specific food item, the process of eating (‘That jerk nommed all my pizza’), or, more typically, the sound of eating itself.”
You could say sneeze, but with this you evoke the volume and (almost) the feeling of a sneeze.
The sound of pain. We don’t need to tell people, “That hurt.” They already know it did as soon as this sound comes out of our mouth.
A double-bounce of mouth relaxation (the ah sound)—no wonder it’s the sound of laughter. People make the haha sound when they laugh with a relaxed, open mouth. Just seeing the word is often enough to activate our mirror neurons—and we’ll talk more about those in chapter 10, for us to aurelate the sound, and to feel some of the (relaxation) benefits of that laughter. Season the ends of your funny sentences with it in writing, and don’t be afraid to laugh in conversations. You’ll help everyone relax.
(And you’ll discover later that kissing is the 42nd happiest word in the English language.) Why is it the word for kissing? Why does it evoke some of the sensations of kissing? Say it now, and feel how much lip action (which Beard talked about) is involved. Even if we can’t kiss in times of Covid-19, making this sound will at least give us some of the sensations. You’re welcome. Mwah.
Add some friendly feelings when you are talking about your or someone else’s dog(s)—and who doesn’t have or know someone with a dog? When a dog makes a sound that’s not a bark, it’s often a friendly woof woof. This is the sound of doggy approval—yes, I want to go for that walk, or yes, I want that treat. It’s also the sound of approval made by some human dogs in response to seeing a very attractive man or woman. Whether the woof of a human or a dog, it’s a sound that connects us with a friendly feeling of approval:
Person A: How is your dog holding up since you’ve been in self-isolation?
Person B: He’s doing well. He still woofs at me when we’re watching BoJack Horseman on TV.
My favorite sounds when going for an evening horseback ride on the back lanes of Cornwall are the clip-clops.
Lions and tigers can make the roar sound because of the flexibility of their loose vocal cords. The low frequency resonates deep within us and tells us to run like hell. Perhaps that’s why, when we hear loud, “throaty” engines roar past, it can give us a fright. Using roar sparingly is a surefire way to grab attention and make the sentence sensory. “I thought I was going fast on the highway, but this BMW roared past me at least 30 mph faster.”
There used to be more bees, and therefore more buzz in America. But go for a summertime country drive and start munching something sweet on your picnic blanket and the buzz is sure to come. Unfortunately, there’s also a good chance it will be from a wasp or flies rubbing their wings together. But the b-word means more than that. Merriam-Webster defines the noun as both “a flurry of activity” and “speculative or excited talk or attention relating especially to a new or forthcoming product or event.” It evokes the feeling of a lot of movement and a lot of activity—so use this word to convey this meaning, but with all the (grounding, instant sensory-connection) onomatopoeic benefits.
From Vocabulary.com:
A croak is the low, hoarse sound a frog makes. Crows and people with sore throats can croak, too. It’s also a slang word for die. When people croak, they need either a glass of water or an undertaker.
If there’s a word that quickly brings attention to the throat and connects to the here and now, this is it. “You have a bit of a croak this morning. Big night last night?”
As soon as I saw this word in front of me, it triggered an image and a sound of a hose with a hole that hissed as the water escaped and sprayed a fine mist. It’s not just snakes that hiss: It’s the sound you hear when you have a puncture in your bicycle or car tire, or that flamingo you are floating around the pool on. It’s the last sound you want to hear when you are in an inflatable kayak two miles off the coast. In most cases, a hiss is a warning sound, prompting us to act fast. It’s a sensory word that gets people’s attention fast as they hear the air hiss between your teeth and tongue. Say it now and you’ll feel what I mean.
You can also make this sound by closing your lips together until you create a seal, suck a little to create a mouth vacuum, then open your mouth—yes, more lip action, popping the seal. But didn’t you just bring your attention back to—and connect with—your body?
“Please ring my doorbell, but don’t bang on my door or let it slam.”
Tut-tut is a great word.
—Emmy Favilla, BuzzFeed copy chief
It’s the sound of disapproval. What connects better: “She looked at him disapprovingly” or “She looked at him and made a tut-tut sound”?
These words represent a large portion of the vocabulary of children—and nom became recognized as a word thanks to children’s television. This makes sense, because onomatopoeia represents the most common sense vocabulary of all. Small children, who have not yet been exposed to generalizations and abstractions, are more sincere than adults. Children learn to be themselves by using their senses before they learn to speak the ego’s language of bullsh*t. But, for adults, where there’s no opportunity for us to buzz, bang, ring, haha, or nom nom, we can connect more with beautiful words, which by their very sound engage our senses. Let’s make euphony and onomatopoeia words of the 21st century, but, most of all, let’s connect with the vivid and speak with our senses.
1 https://www.alphadictionary.com/articles/100_most_beautiful_words.html.