Words: What’s the Opposite of Onomatopoeic?

I’ve always liked words. Nor long-windedness or fussy talking, mind you. But words, those little strutting bits of sound and meaning. Long ago, when I first started to read words without pictures linked to them, some of them used to fly off the page at me.

We had a big Funk and Wagnalls dictionary in the house. I even liked the sound of that, like the sound of “Walter Cronkite”. It was an oddly reassuring and reliable 2-volume set, with its serious, navy blue cover -- though Volume 2 always seemed a little scary. The dictionary was like a book of wizardry. It held a million A to Z keys to doors I couldn’t see beyond.

I’d pick a page at random and find a word I could read but didn’t know, then see if I could understand its definition. That often led to looking up other words. But I kept it to just one word at a time. After all, I liked doing lots of other things too. Like watching cartoons and westerns and playing potsy (you might call it hopscotch) on the sidewalk.

Words I didn’t know seemed especially magical: an entry into a special world that would become visible once defined, Words had different qualities. Some had gravitas, others took flight, others sounded sneering or funny. Sometimes, given its sound, a word’s meaning let it down.

When the definition didn’t fit the impression I had from how the word sounded to me, I thought  the sense and meaning of the word had somehow gotten mixed up along the way. But more often than not, words somehow did fit their sound. Problem was, I often got the sounds wrong initally. Like thinking the US city of "Des Moines" was pronounced “Dezmoynes”.

Now, eons later, it’s still one of my little pleasures to see the ‘word of the day’ from Wordsmith.org in my daily email. Taken out of context and put bluntly on a page of messages, the chosen word stands out as unusually significant, even if you know it. So, when I saw “refulgent” listed last week, I noticed that I had a negative reaction: the word sounded off, like food gone bad. But its meaning is quite the opposite: “brilliantly shining”.

So what are words called that sound opposite to their meaning; anonomatopeic? (I like my made-up word much better than heterological, which is the appropriate one.) There's a distinct Red Queen aspect to liking words, as Alice and Lewis Carroll well knew.

You may think that I must have too much time on my hands if I’m raising such issues. Quite wrong. I have a deadline tomorrow. But words keep spinning their spells. How else to explain the popularity of the Wordsmith.org enterprise?  When I do have some time, I’d like to do a series of word-paintings. Rapp-imagery?

Today's Thought

All my life I've looked at words as though I were seeing them for the first time.
Ernest Hemingway

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