SOUND AS AN ELEMENT OF WRITING STYLE

Aiming for euphony in our English prose
By Jose A.Carillo

My first impulse was to approach euphony from a purely grammatical and structural sense, but I soon discovered that I was dealing with an entirely different species of expression altogether. Explaining euphony is like putting a strange quicksilver animal inside a ribbed cage, the better to observe its physique, behaviors, and eccentricities; as soon as the creature gets settled in the cage, however, it collapses itself into viscous globules, leaches through the cage floor, and eludes further scrutiny.

No wonder then that even the venerable H.W. Fowler, in his 1908 language classic The King’s English, dealt with euphony not so much with a general definition as with copious particulars. He focused on the ten most common devices English writers use to achieve euphony, then gave scores of examples of where they succeeded or failed in the effort.

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(For those who wish to pursue Fowler further, here are the ten euphony devices he dwelt on with his trademark wit: jingles, alliteration, repeated prepositions, sequence of relatives, sequence of “that” and other constructions, metrical prose, sentence accent, causal “as” clauses, wens and hypertrophied members, and careless repetition.)

We can’t be as expansive on euphony here as Fowler, so we will begin more modestly with a formal definition. “Euphony” comes from the Greek euphonia,” for “sweet-voiced, musical.” It is the acoustic pleasure from the sound of words and their combinations, apart from what their surface meanings give us. But measuring euphony is highly subjective; indeed, it’s no surprise that of the elements of style, euphony is the hardest to teach and to learn. Also, euphony is intimately language-based, so we will only know if prose is euphonic if we (1) have a keen ear for words, and (2) have more than just an adequate understanding of the language.

Euphony obviously begins with the right choice of words. The choices need not be fastidious if we are simply doing news reportage or objective treatises; it would, in fact, render our piece suspect to begin with something as lilting as My Fair Lady’s lyrics, “The rain in Spain stays mainly on the plain.”

In persuasive writing, however, we must choose words not only for their surface meanings but also for their acoustic and emotional power. Some words just happen to be euphonic, or look, feel, and sound good, like “dawn,” “luminous,” “melody,” and “lullaby”; but others are naturally cacophonic, or assault the ears and grate on the nerves, such as “belch,” “screech,” “treachery” and “phlegmatic.” 

It’s no accident that many English words with unpleasant meanings are cacophonic; they are sounds of disgust people don’t want to dwell on or can only stand to hear on a fleeting basis.Good-sounding words, in contrast, often find themselves enshrined in aphorisms, mottoes, psalms, songs, poetry, and prose literature. As the American poet and philosopher George Santayana said:

“The stuff of language is words, and the sensuous material of words is sound; if language therefore is to be made perfect, its materials must be made beautiful by being themselves subjected to a measure, and endowed with a form... The tongue will choose those forms of utterance which have a natural grace as mere sound and sensation; the memory will retain these catches, and they will pass and repass through the mind until they become types of instinctive speech and standards of pleasing expression.”

To succeed in writing and speech, then, requires a conscious exercise of euphony or wordplay—the skillful layering of words for both their denotations and connotations, the gentle coaxing of language to yield unstated (or subconscious) yet persuasive meanings through such devices as tone, mood, rhythm, even sound for sound’s sake. A master of this word-layering technique was, of course, Shakespeare, who still speaks cogently to us today through the wit and wordplay of his Elizabethan stage creations. Shakespeare, observes contemporary American writer Christopher Meeks, “was able, through language both simple and complex, to play not only to the groundlings—the poor people standing in the front—but also to the educated royalty in the boxes, and to future generations.”

How do we achieve euphony in own prose? It would take a lot of practice, but we can begin now by thinking not only in terms of ideas but also in terms of sound. We have to work with words not only to create meaning but also to create sounds that evoke feeling. The most memorable prose from Ecclesiastes down to Shakespeare and on to E.L. Doctorow in our own time were constructed not only for their message but for their tonalities, artfully using such acoustic devices as alliteration, consonance, onomatopeia, rhyme, and rhythm. Their thoughts live on as much for the cogency of their ideas as for the great communicative power that euphony brought to their words. From them we have much to learn to make our own words sing and set minds on fire when the occasion calls for it.

This essay first appeared in my “English Plain and Simple” column in The Manila Times and subsequently became Chapter 122 of my book  Give Your English the Winning Edge, ©2009 and published by the Manila Times Publishing Corp.