A former colleague at the university asked if I would proof a paper he had written before he sent it to an academic journal. That’s part of what I did for a living for many years, before retirement, and he knows I'm fast and reliable. It felt like giving an old friend a modest gift. I found a few typos and questioned one of his citations but best of all I encountered the word in the English language I most enjoy pronouncing: molybdenum (Mo, atomic number 42).
My fondness has nothing to do with molybdenum’s chemical properties or its use in military armor, aircraft parts, electrical contacts and industrial motors. I just love saying that double iamb. It sounds like the quintessential mumble. I would have loved to hear Marlon Brando saying the word, which is rooted in scientific Latin. Other nominees for the title Most Euphonious Word in the Language: scrim, adamantine, limbeck, epanalepsis, atrorubent, Precambrian, scofflaw, ball-peen, Guelph, rawky . . .
Jules Renard writes in a
February 1888 entry in his Journal 1887-1910 (trans. Theo Cuffe,
selected and introduced by Julian Barnes, riverrun, 2020): “A word so delicious
that one wishes it had cheeks, so as to kiss them.”
6 comments:
I've just asked my wife, a Yorkshirewoman, if she knows what rawky means; she pointed at the view through the window of the rain-sodden fields on a cold English day. One of her favourite Yorkshire words is maungy, a word her mother used to describe her as a child when she was in a bad mood.
"Molubdos" means "lead" in Greek, and Liddell and Scott list quite a few words with the "molubd" prefix. How the name jumped elements I'll have to leave to historians. My father worked for a while for what had recently been part of Climax Molybdenum but was by then American Metals Climax, later AMAX.
Northern Ohio is rich in Precambrian fossils. A few minutes of looking through the gravel behind the Snow Road firehouse would usually turn up a fossil or two--gastropods maybe.
I am particularly fond of Asafoetida, (the word, not the substance).
I see your "military armor, aircraft parts, electrical contacts and industrial motors" and raise you nitrogenase! . . .
One notable way in which we can tilt soil quality in disastrous directions is to apply nitrogen fertilisers which gives an unfair advantage to bacteria that eat their fixed nitrogen over the bacteria that, at enormous cost, make it. One of the slides I used to show in my lectures about the nitrogen cycle is a patch of soil half covered in clover: that area has been seeded with minute quantities of the element molybdenum which is an essential ingredient of the enzyme nitrogenase which fixes nitrogen from the air. The soil in the picture has been depleted of the element through millions of years of leaching and erosion. We have no idea what effect the loss of nitrogenase bacteria has on the long-term health of the soil, on carbon utilisation, on water-retention, on the mobilisation of trace elements.
I should say now that I had in mind fossils not of the Precambrian Era but of the Paleozoic. The Cambrian period was the first of the Paleozoic.
James Joyce thought "cuspidor" is one of the loveliest words in the English language, prioritizing its phonetic, musical quality over its grotty function.
Might Dan Hicks have called it a Euphonious Pail? https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=5BCYoPZMcs8
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