Wham bam, thank you ma’am.

            The other day I spell checked the word “pfft”.  It passed with flying colors.  This made me very happy.  As with exclamation points, semi-colons and references to intimate body parts, onomatopoeia can be very effective, if used sparingly.  Tom Wolfe never thought to resist any onomatopoeic impulse, but he’s the only author I know who got away with it.  (Batman comics notwithstanding.)

            It’s not only effective, it’s loads of fun.  It’s like splashing around in the mud.  Whacking a barn with a baseball bat.  Popping bubble gum.  Swooshing down the side of a mountain on a pair of skis.

            A lot of words don’t precisely mimic their subject, but sound pretty close to what they describe.  Bullet.  Grotesque.  Punch.  Slime.  Squeeze.  Jet.  Fart.  Kiss.  Others sound like they’re off by about 180 degrees.  My favorite is Pulchritude.  How did sublime beauty take up residence on the same block as Poultice or Putrid?  How could a lovely word like Sanguine, meaning optimistic, have such bloody roots?   Other words sound worse than they are.  Phlegmatic.  Dyspeptic.  Zaftig also doesn’t sound all that great, though Yiddish speakers likely meant it to reassure the rotund.  On the other hand, I would have thought Jejune was a rather pleasant state of affairs if I hadn’t looked it up.  It’s why I’m sticking with Vapid, for its unmistakably vaporous disposition. 

        Yiddish may seem the invention of a clever stand up, but English can often feel like a practical joke.  If there’s a specific thing you should be doing that’s good for you, it’s Prescribed.  If you shouldn’t touch it with a ten-foot pole, the thing gets Proscribed.  If you’re bathed in admiration, you’re experiencing Approbation.  If the pitch forks are out for you, it’s Opprobrium.  It’s good to know if you’re researching something’s Etymological roots, and not its Entomological, unless you want bugs floating around in your word soup.  The same crew can raze a barn or raise it, though you need to know their intentions before deciding on the spelling.  Since we have Flammable, it seems profligate to have Inflammable as well, since it means the same thing, and sounds like you mean the opposite. 

Worse is Cleave.  It means to split apart, but also to tightly adhere.  Contranyms are not only confusing, they’re simply unfair. 

A Gimlet eye is reputed to be sharp and penetrating, though I once knew a chap who had an affectionate relationship with the vodka variety, and I’d say glazed was a more apt description. 

 Pleasing notions produce soothing words to the ear.  One can easily imagine people of various origins serenely flowing together, as tributaries join a river, when they Assimilate.  Words with well-placed esses are often like this.  I never had to look up Verisimilitude.  And no other word than Sibilance could accurately express the lispy phenomenon (though disliked by recording engineers).  Only a word with a soft touch could adequately conjure a Caress, usually an act requiring some Finesse. 

            On the other hand, a few hard consonants were smartly recruited to identify a Block.  (No one stubbed their toe on a word overflowing with vowels, unless they happen to be French.)  There are probably a hundred slang terms for penis, but nothing is so instructional, or adaptable to describing a thoughtless, sadistic jerk, as a Prick.  Here, the concluding consonant is essential to the effect.  If you find yourself in a Funk, you can blame the same consonant, appropriately placed, for ruining the word Fun.   When others try to foist off obvious falsehoods as truth, it’s no wonder we call it Bunk, proving consonants’ suitability for delivering ridicule.

Some words are so perfectly contrived, that looking for synonyms feels ungrateful.  Blasphemy is custom crafted to be spoken by a crusading inquisitioner, a word you can bellow from the pulpit or whisper in dim candlelight.  The first person to pull a sticky mass off the bottom of their schoolhouse desk surely called it a Wad.  In that same schoolhouse, the anonymous word coiner likely came up with Zit, a far more evocative identification than any of its peers.

  This all may seem the preoccupation of a Logophile, and I’ll gladly cop to it, though there’s a drawback to this.  Logo also means a symbol or design used to express the brand identity of a product or service.  I’m fine with this as an ordinary practice, but when marketers think it’s wise to wallpaper the entire world with their self-serving promotion, it’s just obnoxious. 

How about, logophile declares himself an antilogoist?