The Music of Words

“To me, the greatest pleasure of writing is not what it's about, but the inner music the words make.”  ~Truman Capote, McCall's, November 1967

When I was around eight years old, my mother told me that the most beautiful words in the English language are cellar door. Actually, what she said was, “They say that the most beautiful words in the English language are cellar door.” I thought this was weird on so many levels, not least of which was wondering who the they were who thought these were lovely words.

That is, until I conducted a perfunctory Internet search for the term cellar door before consigning my mother’s statement to the annals of insane mother remarks. It turns out, that my mother wasn’t making this up. In 1955, J.R.R. Tolkien wrote that cellar door had a beautiful sound – one of the most beautiful in the English language. As if to give credence to this, Cellar Door is the name of the literary magazine at the University of North Carolina, Chapel Hill. 

I think attic entrance has a certain ring to it…