Nova revija (the new magazine), one of the more respected slovene magazines and lately one of the leading slovene publishing houses made a contest for the most beautiful slovene word. The results declared the word MIDVA (us) as the most beautiful word, runner-up was the word HREPENENJE (yearning) and third place belonged to the word TAČKA (little paw).
Personally, I think that`s a load of crap. Words are not beautiful and ugly. They`re just words. Without a context they are a mere letter compositions. High theory.
Reference links
24ur
Nova revija homepage
An article “Nova Revija“, published in Mladina
I personally don’t see any reason why one shouldn’t be able to find some words more and some less aesthetically pleasing. It may be due to the sound of the word when spoken, or the appearance of the letters when written down. This may sound absurd, but is it really any different than the fact that we find some blots of color or some sequences of musical tones beautiful? Some part of our brain gets tickled in just the right way, and we call it beauty, though we can’t quite tell why we like it.
Alternatively, some people may judge the beauty of words based on their meaning. I suspect that the choice of words you mention above was strongly influenced by such criteria. Apparently some rather romantic people must have been involved, causing words such as “the two of us” and “yearning” to come to the top. I don’t object to this in principle, but I do find it somewhat dishonest to call the results “the most beautiful word” rather than e.g. “the most beautiful concept”.
At the same time, I must admit that I also, like you, find “most beautiful word” contests to be quite silly, for the simple reason that there aren’t any obvious standards of beauty to use when evaluating the different words. This is true to some extent for any kind of beauty, but especially so for the beauty of words, which is a particularly unclear concept. Such a contest must inevitably degenerate into a popularity contest, or into a parade of the opinions and preferences of some individual person or a small group of people.
In the end, I guess that the primary purpose of such concepts is to increase the visibility of their organizers in the media, and to enable newspapers to fill up space when there is nothing better to write about.
Oh, words can be so beautiful! I have got a whole collection. My favorite Slovene word is zivljenje. For the sound and the meaning.
In my opinion words, things, music, people etc. have a sort of energy. All ‘things’ have energy. And different people, with different energy readers, are attracted to different words, things, music, people etc. So speaking of The most beautiful word/miss/music…blah blah…is usless. It’s only for killing time. Taste is a subjective thing anyways.
A slovene word that i like to say and like to hear and has a deep meaning to me is hvala.
Words like violence break the silence, come crashing in into my little world. Words are very unnecessary, they can only do harm.
Pingback: The L Files » Blog Archive » Call to arms!