Inkless

After a bit of fighting with the table-creation program, my list of resonances and list of discordances are ready to go live. I use the term “resonance” to mean a word which is an idea onomatopoeia. Rather than “hiss” or “splat”, which are meant to sound like the phenomena they describe—the sound of one of these words evokes a feeling that is in harmony with the meaning of the word. Examples include pithy, bawd, and cacophony. A discordance, in contrast, is a word for which the sound and the meaning seem to clash. Examples of words I consider discordances are limerence, osculate, fisticuffs, and grok.

Before you catch me: I know of at least one term that already refers to this type of word: ideophone. But ideophone seems too cold and scholarly to itself be an ideophone, so that’s why I decided on resonance.

Please check out the resonances and discordances and let me know what you think.

Thank you for your interest!