As anyone who has studied a second language
knows, the relationship between a word and the concept it carries is arbitrary. When I say the
word “pencil,” there is nothing inherent in the sound of that word or the way that it is written
that is pencil-like. We call it a pencil because of convention—everyone who speaks English has
learned that the sound “pencil” means this thing. In German, this same thing is
referred to as a Bleistift. And is Spanish it is “lápiz.” And in
Bengali it is পেন্সিল [pēnsila]. And again, there is nothing inherently bleistift-y
or lápiz-y or pēnsila-y about a pencil. As the great linguist Ferdinand de
Saussure observed over a century ago, there is never a singular, natural relationship
between a word and the concept that it signifies. Otherwise, we’d all be speaking the same language!
Word don’t mimic the natural world. They replace that natural world with a series of arbitrary
sounds and signs that help up to process it. But wait a second. What about a word like boom,
or chuckle, or hiccup, or cock-a-doodle-do? These words seem to mimic what they
represent out there in the world—the sounds of explosions, of laughter,
of hiccups, and of roosters. The literary term for these kinds of words is
“onomatopoeia,” from the Greek words “onoma,” meaning name, and “poiein” meaning to make. But
instead of making or using arbitrary words to signify some unrelated thing (like a pencil), when
we speak in onomatopoeias, we are using words that sound like the things they describe. “Boom”
sounds a lot like, well, this… [BOOM]. Does this mean that some words DO have a
natural relationship to the world out there? Saussure takes up this question in
his Course in General Linguistics, published in 1916, and his answer is… well, not
exactly. After all, he reasons, onomatopoeias sound different as we move from language to
language. In English, we say “cock-a-doodle-do” to describe the crowing of a rooster. In French,
however, the word is “cocorico,” and in German it is “kikeriki.” The same goes for hiccup, which
is “hoquet” in French and “hipo” in Spanish. Now, French and German roosters probably don’t
have French or German accents. And people around the world all probably hiccup in the same
way. So what accounts for these differences? What Saussure concludes is that we understand
the sounds that we hear out there in the world not only through the actual
sound of a rooster, a hiccup, or an explosion but also through
the languages that we know. Onomatopoeias are therefore strange words
that mimic the sounds of the natural world at the same time as they are
shaped by the language we speak. And this is what makes them so fascinating
to poets and other literary authors. To my mind, the most interesting forms
on onomatopoeia call attention to this relationship between sound and language.
I am thinking here of words and phrases that produce what is called an onomatopoetic
effect, even if the words are not, strictly speaking, onomatopoeia.
Let me give you one example. William Carlos Williams’ 1946 poem “The
Injury” opens with the following lines: From this hospital bed
I can hear an engine breathing—somewhere
in the night: —Soft coal, soft coal,
soft coal! Williams’s speaker is listening
to the engine of a train here, which takes in “soft coal” in the same way that we
inhale oxygen to breathe. But Williams’ metaphor stretches into the realm of onomatopoeia in
the repetition of the last lines: “soft coal, soft coal, soft coal!”, which mimics the
chuffing of a coal-fired steam train. The words themselves—soft and coal--would
never be considered onomatopoeia. Instead, they work like normal words: they are
arbitrary sounds for two different concepts. But by placing them in sequence within the
stanza, Williams brings forth a surprising sound that is BOTH natural and linguistic. In
this way, his poem shows how onomatopoeias align the sounds of the world out there with the
words that we use to understand that world. If you have any other examples of
onomatopoeia or onomatopoetic effects, I hope you’ll share them with me in the comment
section below. Happy reading, everybody.