Buncha Basement Noise

I've been duped. For years I recalled reading somewhere that some survey of linguistic bigwigs had determined that the seemingly mundane phrase "cellar door" was the most beautiful in the English language. I had my quibbles--for starters I'd take the phrase "another brewski, dude?"--but I liked knowing this rather obscure fact. Well, it's neither obscure (the first person I assailed today by shouting "cellar door" at her immediately said, "Isn't that like the most supposedly beautiful phrase in the English language or something?" [she quibbled too, preferring the phrase "Harvey says hello"]), nor apparently fact. Once again, the know-it-alls at wikipedia seem to have the full, and quite interesting, scoop here. It seems that the estimable (though unread by some who shall remain nameless) J.R.R. Tolkien is the likely candidate for starting the cult of "cellar door" in an essay and later an interview. From there the tale winds through heavyweights H.L. Mencken, Jacques Barzun, anonymous Chinese or Japanese of Italian students (no, it doesn't involve someone saying, "Sell her door, she'll be back tomorrow for hinges and knobs") and even Donnie Darko. The survey, alas, is apocryphal.

Too bad, because I was all set to reveal numbers two through ten here today: "cheesey breeze," "more bacon?" "that blonde likes you," "sufferin' succotash," "liposuctions performed here," "he was the nazz, with God-given ass," "idiot's delight," "Uma Thurman" and "hellfire." But I guess that joke's gone.

Now in his defense, Tolkien says you have to detach the phrase "cellar door" from its meaning and its spelling. Okay, J double-R. But that's kind of like taking the sugar out of cotton candy. Anyway, I can't detach anything from the word cellar. The word freaks me out, to be honest, conjuring all sorts of nasty images of Kansas tornados, earth-mothers preservering pickles in big jars whose lids (the jars) never come off correctly, cobwebs, the ultimate fantod word "dank," sump pumps, and people not hip enough to use the word basement. And those doors! Those maw of hell flapping wooden things! Not for nothing did my sister and I spend half our childhoods trying to convince the other to accompany her or me whenever we had to go to the basement for something. There weren't monsters under my bed (too crowded what with all the dirty clothes), but down in the dank cellar, just the other side of the cellar door, lurked hideous things that J.R.R. couldn't imagine in his worst fevered nightmares. I'm sorry, no "cellar door" on any best of list for me.

In fact, if it weren't for my beloved Bob Dylan, I might have no use for basements at all. But after all, Johnny was mixing the medicine down there, and of course "I lived with them on Montague Street, in a basement down the stairs," and the pinnacle of any kind of basement talk celebration, "Look here you buncha basement noise," on the album titled, naturally, The Basement Tapes. In fact, I think my lifelong fear of cellars and such only abated enough for me to go down there unshaking after I discovered The Basement Tapes, ironically, around the same time my sister went off to college.

So, balderdash or not, I just can't credit "cellar door" at all. To me, the sweetest sounding word/phrase in the English language is really quite apparent, once you give it some thought. It's anytime Smokey Robinson sings "baby..."

Bob Dylan and The Band-You Ain't Goin' Nowhere

The Ramones-I Don't Wanna Go Down To The Basement