Beauty of “Cellar Door”

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It’s another minicast from A Way with Words. I’m Martha Barnette.

What are the two most beautiful words in the English language?

I’m serious. Go ahead, think about it for a moment.

And I’m not talking about the meaning of the words.

I’m talking about their sound.

What to you are the most sensuous, mellifluous, easy-on-the-ears two words you can think of?

Recently, a listener named Brady called us from Seattle to talk about this.

He’d just seen a film in which this question is discussed.

And one of the characters has an answer that’s pretty surprising.

I was wondering, in the movie Donnie Darko, Drew Barrymore mentions that the words cellar door are the most beautiful words ever written or ever said.

I forget the actual line, but I was just wondering why cellar door is so significant as of all the other words that are out there.

Cellar door, C-E-L-L-A-R-D-O-O-R?

Yes.

Do you think it’s beautiful?

Well, I mean, family has a vineyard in Northern California.

I like the idea of it.

You’re imagining what’s behind the door, right?

Yeah, yeah.

But I think in the movie they’re talking about specifically just the sound of it, right?

Devoid of any meaning, right?

They’re just saying that the words are the most beautiful words in the English language, right?

Right, right.

The movie was released, I think, in 2003.

What’s interesting about cellar door is that that particular idea,

That the two-word compound cellar door is somehow beautiful,

Has been transmitted for probably more than 100 years.

You can trace it.

It keeps popping up in books and articles.

Language columnists write about it.

People put it in stage plays here and there.

People talk about it in anecdotes and jokes.

And dictionary editors will use it in their lists of them, you know,

Or it’ll come up in response to the list of the most beautiful words.

And I don’t know where the screenwriters for Donnie Darko got it.

I wonder if they picked it from a particular source.

But I wouldn’t be surprised that they just picked it up in Ether.

Because an interesting thing about this particular two-word compound,

Cellar door, is that I think it’s transmitted without people really knowing

Where they picked up the idea that cellar door is beautiful to hear

Or beautiful to say.

So you find, for example, H.L. Mencken, he mentions it as a beautiful word in 1922.

You find somebody else mentioning it in response to, well, Funk, the dictionary editor.

What’s his name?

Wilfred Funk of Funk and Wagnalls.

Wilfred Funk of Funk and Wagnalls put out a list in 1932 of supposedly beautiful words.

And then all the, you know, the witty gadflies of the day, F. Scott Fitzgerald and Dorothy Parker and Ring Lardner all had to chime in with the words that they thought were the most beautiful.

This is 1932.

And two separate people, Dorothy Parker among them, suggested cellar door.

You know, I’ve got uses of 1919 and 1921, even as far back as 1911, where somebody attributes it to some unknown Italian who says,

An Italian is authority for the statement that we have in the English language, two words which, when joined, have a beauty unequaled by any phrase in the Italian tongue.

These beautiful words are cellar door.

And so I don’t know where I got started.

That’s as far back as I can take it.

You’ll find people say a Frenchman said it or an Italian said it.

Some people say that Edgar Allan Poe said it.

Some people say that Mencken said it.

Of course, Mencken doesn’t attribute it to anybody, and he didn’t say it first.

And so it’s a big muddled mess.

If you go to Wikipedia, Wikipedia says that J.R.R. Tolkien said it in 1956.

But he’s a latecomer to the cellar door party.

It was long.

It already had wings and was flying all around long before that.

So, Brady, I just I don’t find it particularly beautiful even.

And I guess the idea was choose something that’s really mundane and talk about it in terms of just the sound.

But it doesn’t really turn me on.

And besides, I think we need to update it to something much, much later.

Microchip is kind of a nice word, don’t you think?

Dotcom. There you go.

Dotcom.

Oh, sure.

Here, try this one on for size.

One of the citations for this I found was from 1921.

Professor Alan David Robertson of the University of Chicago said,

Cellar door, oleomargarine.

Oleomargarine, cellar door.

If we agree with modern fanatics that assonance and cadence alone make poetry,

We have a poem in those four words.

Oleomargarine.

Yeah, it’s really weird that this cellar door meme has been around for so long

And nobody’s quite figured out where it came from.

Cellar door.

Cellar door.

Is it beautiful?

I don’t think it’s beautiful to me.

I don’t.

I think it started as a joke and then some people took it seriously

And some people took it as a joke and it’s been transmitted along.

Yeah, it’s been transmitted along both paths.

You’ll find it in little newspaper anecdote columns here and there,

And you’ll find people put it in wacky word books,

And people just throw it out as an unsourced fact as if it’s got some value.

Yeah, I mean, funk’s list is much more beautiful.

It has words like, what, lullaby and chimes and murmuring and time queen.

You know, when you start talking about beautiful words,

The problem with a lot of these lists is that people get caught up in the idea behind the words.

Right, right.

Cellar door, it’s not about the thing.

It’s not about the denotation.

It’s about the connotation.

Actually, no, it’s about the assonance.

Yeah, it is about the assonance.

But I don’t know why it couldn’t have been.

What’s that?

How it sounds?

Yeah, how it sounds.

How it sounds as opposed to its meaning.

Like linoleum.

I kind of like linoleum.

So Donnie Darko then is just the latest iteration of somebody passing along this meme

That cellar door is somehow beautiful to hear and to say.

Well, you have to hand it to Dorothy Parker.

She also observed that the two most beautiful words in the English language are check and closed.

I’d have to agree with her on that.

Well, we’d love to hear from you.

What are the most beautiful words in the English language?

And remember, we’re not talking about the meaning.

So no fair mentioning words like mother or love or butterflies.

We’re talking about the sounds of particular words.

The Russian painter Vasily Kandinsky said that to really see the formal elements in a painting,

You should turn it upside down.

So I want you to turn words upside down and tell me which ones you think are the most beautiful,

Regardless of their meaning.

Send your answers to words@waywordradio.org, and we’ll share some of them on the air.

Oh, and by the way, Grant became so fascinated with the mystery of whoever came up with that cellar door idea

That he went on to do even more than his usual sleuthing.

Inspired by Brady’s question, he researched and wrote an entire article about this,

Which ended up running in the New York Times Sunday magazine.

You can find a link to it on our website.

That’s waywordradio.org.

Thanks for listening.

I hope you hear lots of mellifluous words this week.

For A Way with Words, I’m Martha Barnette.

Bye.