Onomatopoeia, onomato-PEE-AHHHH
A childish infatuation with sounds…
Oh my goodness Doc, there’s no way I can comply with the “favorite sound”, the singular requirement, as onomatopoeias have since childhood been the staple and perhaps only poetic device I could relish as an avowed hater of poetry.
In fact, when I first learned the word, I fell in love with it because I heard it as onomato-PEE-AHHHHH… and who hasn’t simultaneously made both sounds after running home from school waddling with a soccer ball of a bladder, ten miles uphill in ten feet of snow, and released both liquid and air from every membranous bag in the body.
And what child does not find the trifecta of P sounds to be the soul of humor, pee, poo and puke are the triune, da faddah, da muddah, and da Holy Ghost of onomato-PEE-AAAHHHHs.
So, flips and flaps and flops and snicks and thwacks and chocks nestle in my brain alongside flush and thrush and swish and swoosh… the wonderful movement of air or water perhaps reining only slightly with their susurrations, itself a beautiful word and sound, over the harder sounds of impact, like thunk or clunk or crash or bash.
And right there, those two, crash and bash, combining the hard crunching impact of a “C” or a “B” with the susurration of the “sh”, lovingly, within the body of the word, marrying the suddenness of the accident with the reverberation, the sustained sounds, retained in the memory of distance and air. Like peanut butter and chocolate, what is better in life than a beautiful pairing of opposites?
What kid doesn’t like animals, so chipmunks and chicks and chickadees and crows and cuckoos are words that embed instantly in the childish brain as their names encode their sounds and calls, and are as infinitely reinforcing as an echo.
So, my apologies for failing to pick a favorite, as I hem and haw and hum over my options, and instead I’ll hew the rules of the game, and cut and chop and chew my way into new behaviors not expected in the good request made by the good doctor… I’ll shave and shear and shape and shove my way into a new post and click and clack on my keyboard to make a link instead.
And of course, as a woodworker, I love to spend my days chipping and chopping and chiseling and whittling and hacking and carving and hammering. Sand is, to my mind, unambiguously an onomatopoeia, as it replicates the sound of sanding your work, whether wood or metal, as it does the sound of water rushing over the sand of a beach, or the sound of sand as it pours onto itself… it is an infinitely recursive onomatopoeia.
Thank you Michael Burg, MD for your kind tag, and I hope I can thank you (and the others) for your patience as I trample over all the rules of the game.
Y’all are wonderful.
Peace,
SD
