A Word Like a Butterfly, Pinned
Thoughts and Feelings about Phonetic Flow
Much of style isn’t something we study but something we absorb through reading. When that sponge method breaks down however, we can talk about words—and in talking we take what’s simple and make it complicated and obscure. We ruin everything. Let’s do that now. On steroids. Let’s talk about phonetic flow.
The smallest unit of storytelling is the meme.* The smallest unit of sound that distinguishes one word from another is a phoneme.
(*That’s not the real definition of a meme. I apologize profusely and promise to seek help.)
When starting phonemes match, that’s amore. I mean, that’s alliteration. Alliteration can both help and hinder flow, with significant stretches stifling sufficient readability, while brief bursts guide a reader to mentally organize the sentence’s central ideas.
When ending phonemes match like a fly fisherman’s catch, you’re in love. Or rather, that’s rhyme. Accidental ending rhymes are rooted out. Rhyme can be used intentionally, and while ending rhymes are difficult to use well, internal rhyme can move a reader smoothly through the sentence.
Adjacent phonemes are difficult to say and thus hard to read. Compare “move a reader smoothly” with “move readers smoothly,” where the effort necessary to mentally separate the adjacent phonemes becomes a stumbling block to the sentence’s flow.
How are we doing so far? Good? Here’s another easy one: Onomatopoeia whispers and shrieks its information, as the need may be, momentarily elevating the word over the buzz of background noise.
Meanwhile, liquids, fricatives, and plosives are forms of consonant sounds that create distinctly different results.
The plosive is a sound made in an instant by cutting off and releasing airflow, their sounds can’t be drawn out. Petty is made up of voiceless plosives, while bad employs voiced plosives.
Liquids and fricatives are drawn out, with liquids having less restriction of the air flow. The way plosive begins with a plosive /p/, so liquids (/l/ and /r/) and fricatives (/f/, /v/, /s/, and /z/…) start with examples of themselves as well. Liquids supply a flowing sound, while a fricative brings clarity to a word as well as an audible tension.
Plosives are explosive. While too many strung together can be jarring, their sharp sounds can increase the pace of a sentence and create emphasis.
A liquid’s role is to lend euphony to a sentence, but flow isn’t about limiting ourselves to phonemes that “flow.” It’s a pattern formed as relaxed and languid lines clash with the cacophony that is syntactic dissonance.
If you’ve studied meter in poetry, you’ll recall worrying over every syllable, both stressed and unstressed. Prose also has meter, but the only concern is the stressed syllable. The timing between these stressed syllables remains constant, no matter how many unstressed syllables fit between. The result is that short, monosyllabic words slow the reading down, which can be used to the writer’s strategic advantage, while polysyllabic words and their unstressed syllables can aid a sentence’s sense of flow.
Whatever wonders befall man tonight…
Which one falls down now…
As you read these, the stressed syllables in the first line and the second fall into the same rhythm, which is made possible by the slight pauses you insert between the words of the second line.
In that fist line, without breaking meter, the flow feels like it takes a beat just before befall, but this isn’t aspect of stressed syllables but of the impact of the plosive which doesn’t glide but has a singular beat that defines it’s sound. The /w/, by contrast is called a semivowel or a glide. They’re consonants that act like vowels and glide words between the articulators that create consonant sounds (such as the tongue, lips, teeth, or the ridge just behind the upper front teeth).
The semivowel, like a liquid (or to some degree a fricative), aids in sonic flow by the variable length of its sound. Plosives create staccato when grouped together. That staccato effect can also be achieved by short, sharp sentences.
He was alone. He was unheeded, happy, and near to the wild heart of life. He was alone and young and wilful and wildhearted, alone amid a waste of wild air and brackish waters and the seaharvest of shells and tangle and veiled grey sunlight.
Portrait of the Artist as a Young Man — James Joyce
The repeated /h/ is one example of alliteration in this piece and is also a glottal fricative, meaning it passes air through the vocal cords without making a sound. The /ai/ in wild and life (the long “i” sound) is an internal rhyme.
A detour from phonetics:
We’ve discussed before polysyndeton, which is the heavy use of conjunctions as we see with: He was alone and young and wilful and wildhearted.
On and on she went, across Piccadilly, and up Regent Street, ahead of him, her cloak, her gloves, her shoulders combining with the fringes and the laces and the feather boas in the windows to make the spirit of finery and whimsy which dwindled out of the shops on to the pavement, as the light of a lamp goes wavering at night over hedges in the darkness.
Mrs. Dalloway — Virginia Woolf
Here was have asyndeton and polysyndeton, both, with the first used to describe the young woman and the second, her environment. I make this side trip to point out that asyndeton and parataxis (which we discussed in relation to Hemingway) are similar but not the same. Parataxis involved independent clauses. Asyndeton occurs within the clause, as we see in the example above.
If Woolf had written “She went across Piccadilly. She went up Regent Street. She went ahead of him…” that would have been parataxis, as independent clauses follow one another without conjunctions.
Now back to phonetics, already in progress:
On and on she went, across Piccadilly, and up Regent Street, ahead of him, her cloak, her gloves, her shoulders combining with the fringes and the laces and the feather boas in the windows to make the spirit of finery and whimsy which dwindled out of the shops on to the pavement, as the light of a lamp goes wavering at night over hedges in the darkness.
Internal rhyme: spirit… whimsy… dwindled
Alliteration: light of a lamp
Changes of pace through groupings of monosyllabic words followed by polysyllabic ones: her cloak, her gloves, her shoulders combining with the fringes and the laces and the feather boas in the windows
Woolf transitions through these grouping by moving from a plosive that emphasizes the crisp pattern of the stressed syllables (cloak /c/) to the fricatives (gloves /g/ and shoulders /sh/). This then becomes the semivowels (windows, whimsy which, wavering) and liquids (light, lamp). It’s a transition into increasingly flowing sounds and then back out again with night (/n/: nasal consonant), hedges (/h/: glottal fricative) and darkness (/d/: plosive).
Woolf wasn’t talking to herself about her use of phonetic patterns, and the term, glottal fricative, probably didn’t cross her mind as she wrote. Instead, she followed the sounds—as writers do when they write and aren’t talking about writing. She will even tell you, she wasn’t thinking about her words but something different.
As she said in her spoken essay, “Craftmanship,” in 1937:
Words do not live in dictionaries, they live in the mind… A few trifling rules of grammar and spelling are all the constraint we can put on them. All we can say about them… is that they seem to like people to think and to feel before they use them, but to think and to feel not about them, but about something different. They are highly sensitive, easily made self-conscious. They do not like to have their purity or their impurity discussed.
I so often do the exact wrong thing in these essays.
She continues, and with this continuation, we’ll come close to our end:
Perhaps then one reason why we have no great poet, novelist or critic writing to-day is that we refuse words their liberty. We pin them down to one meaning… And when words are pinned down they fold their wings and die.
These words that want us to think and feel but not not to think and feel about them, but about something different, their rhythms get into your soul. You might not be able to express that the instantaneous burst of sound a plosive makes creates a pause that forces a reader’s rhythm, but you feel it’s there.
Whatever wonders befall man tonight…
You feel the rhythm of stressed syllables, and through copious readings of well-written works, you overflow with rhythm until it spills into your writing. Either that, or we pin down words like butterfly wings and talk about phonemes and plossives and their place in perpetuating pace.
Your choice.
— Thaddeus Thomas
