'Onomatopoeia Is a Fiction'

All of us subscribe to nonsense, especially when we’re young and it’s delivered by certified authorities. No one is sufficiently skeptical or sophisticated to be always immune to such blather. We’d like to think of maturing as a steady process of shedding such illusions, except that we have known too many old fools sitting alongside the young ones. 

In eighth grade our English teacher assured us that Shelley wrote the first line of “Ode to the West Wind” the way he did – “O wild West Wind, thou breath of Autumn’s being” – because all those initial w’s sounded like the titular breeze. We swallowed whole the self-evident reality of onomatopoeia. Jacques Barzun set me straight: “I do not believe a word of it. Onomatopoeia is a fiction.”

 

When his essay “Onoma-Onomato-Onomatwaddle” was published in the Autumn 1990 issue of The Kenyon Review, I hadn’t given much thought to onomatopoeia in years. It had always seemed more like a novelty than anything important or interesting about poetry and language in general. Often, as in Shelley’s case, it amounted to little more than gratuitous alliteration.

 

Barzun came to his conclusion when a Japanese friend told him the most beautiful word in English was cellardoor. “It was not beautiful to me and I wondered where its evocative power lay for the Japanese,” he writes. “Was it because they find l and r difficult to pronounce and the word thus acquires remoteness and enchantment?” Barzun learned his friend had never seen a cellardoor. He suspects “its charmless-ness to speakers of English lay simply in its meaning.” Barzun sensibly concludes: “The magic, color, music of the words said to be onomatopoetic in poetry is due primarily to their meaning.”  

 

Most of Barzun’s essay is devoted to French verse, but his argument remains the same. Because of its stronger, more numerous consonants, he speculates, the Germanic languages may have more opportunities to produce genuine onomatopoeias – “because the sounds of nature have an edge which the vowels that predominate in French cannot approximate.” He concludes: “But until further notice I shall believe that English can show only one true onomatopoeia, and that one not intended: it is the word adenoidal [OED: ‘having a monotonous and constricted nasal quality.’]”

 

Ten years ago on this date, October 24, 2012, Barzun died at age 104. He was among the sanest, most orderly minded of writers.

 

[Barzun’s article was excerpted from An Essay on French Verse: For Readers of English Poetry (1991) and collected in The Jacques Barzun Reader (2002).]