On: Cellar Door: a quest to find the most beautiful word in English

[yesbabyyes]

A bit of background: JRR Tolkien developed a linguistic branch he called "phonaesthetics", the study of beauty of words. Many writers have agreed on "cellar door" to be beautiful in terms of the sound of the phrase.

https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Phonaesthetics#Cellar_door

[mindvirus → yesbabyyes]

Very interesting, I'd always thought it was a made up thing from Donnie Darko.

[Wistar → yesbabyyes]

Interesting. I have long thought the word “celerity” to be a beautiful word.

[sparky_z → Wistar]

I've heard it said (perhaps apocryphally) that when non-English speakers are asked to judge words based purely on aesthetics, the word 'diarrhea' tends to rank quite highly.

[082349872349872 → sparky_z]

Using generative Natural Intelligence, an italian wrote a top 40 song that sounded to 1970s non-english speakers as if it had had english lyrics: https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=-VsmF9m_Nt8

(compare "abstract comics", "asemic writing")

[bregma → sparky_z]

To be fair, it does have a certain flow.