@BARTLEBY ON LANGUAGE: What is the Most Beautiful Word in the World?

Donald Trump has said that “tariff” is the “most beautiful word in the dictionary.” He further stated that tariffs “make our country rich” and “cost Americans nothing.” And throughout his first months in office, he has given Americans – indeed people across the globe – plenty of cause to google that word’s definition.

For those who could not change the channel quick enough and caught President Trump’s speeches on Inauguration Day, the television viewer would have caught him expressing this sentiment, only to stop and correct himself and say, “well, actually God, religion and love” instead.

What is it that makes this word so beautiful? Apparently “tariffs are going to make us [i.e. the people of the United States] rich as hell. It’s going to bring our country’s businesses back that left us.”

My thoughts immediately turned to William Safire, the former Nixon speechwriter who, despite having dropped out of college without a degree, becamean unofficial arbiter of English language usageand one of the most widely-read writers on language in the latter part of the twentieth century. Would Safire take pleasure in denouncing Trump’s word choice? As I began my enquiry into this question, all I could think about was what would Safire say?

“Pleasure is a beautiful word,” Safire wrote in his “On Language” column on May 13, 2007. “That ’s’ in the middle, pronounced like the ‘z’in azure, a word favored by lyric poets, gives a little thrill to the mouth. The meaning in the noun alone – ‘happy satisfaction or enjoyment; delight, gratification’ – runs 26 printed-out pages in the Oxford English Dictionary Online, including the indulgence of physical, especially sexual, desires or appetites,’ specifically to take one’s pleasure, a lazily elegant way of saying ‘to have sexual intercourse.’”

One of the few points of agreement between Safire and Trump (were the former to still be alive) was that the first two-odd months of his second term may very well have changed the world. It was during this time that he inflicted what may prove to be fatal blows against the Western alliance that has protected much of the developed world for nearly 80 years, followed by Wednesday’s “Liberation Day” when he declared war on a global trade system that has helped maintain a kind of Gleichgewicht between trading partners as well as between the haves and the have-nots.

Years earlier, on June 14, 1981, Safire had recalled how the British-born scientist and coiner of the word “psychedelic,” Dr. Humphrey Osmond,  recounted his early efforts to create the word in his book, “Predicting the Past.”

Osmond sent a draft of his paper on mescaline and LSD for the New York Academy of Medicine to his friend Aldous Huxley, the author and psychic experimenter, and asked for a suitable word. “By return post came a beautiful word,“ recalled Dr. Osmond, … ‘phanerothyme.’ Its roots are phaneroin, a Greek word meaning ‘to reveal,’ and thumos, ‘the soul.’”

Osmond then wrote back to Huxley, including a little rhyme: “To fall in Hell or soar angelic / You’ll need a pinch of psychedelic.”

At no time in his life has your humble scrivener ever wanted to both fall in hell and soar angelic at the same time, so if any readers can spare a pinch, please contact the undersigned most urgently.

(Photo: Accura Media Group)