Sounds Like?

CRUNCH!!... BLAM!!... SPLAT!!... There it is.  That’s how you get things off and running.  That‘s the way you open with a BANG!!... Oh, and I’m just getting started.  You’ve been forewarned.  Know that at any time I’m liable to toss in a SLAP or a SMASH, maybe even a BOOM!  That’s right, nothing’s out of bounds today.  Today, I’m apt to BLAST my way from one paragraph to the next with no holds barred.  SMASH one idea up against the next. SHATTER everything into pieces like a word salad gone rogue.  WHACK everyone over the head with opposing viewpoints.  RATTLE your brains with so much hearsay… And yeah, that THUD you just heard was me tripping over my own words.

Alright, sorry if I startled you with that grandiose, over-the-top, admittedly on-the-nose opening.  It was my feeble attempt to introduce today’s subject with a bit of a flourish, so for those of you who are still wondering what the hell I’m talkin’ about, I’ll just spell it out for you right here: “onomatopoeia”… Get a load of that, right?  Twelve letters and eight of ‘em are vowels?  Who does that?!  It’s as if some militant dyslexic group rewrote parts of the “Old MacDonald” song.  It’s like Vanna White’s puzzle board on acid.  It’s the kind of word that sends National Spelling Bee contestants home.  And then off to a team of therapists.  The kind of word that has Spellcheck taking a sick day.  And then off to a team of IT personnel.  That’s right, an in-your-face, superfluously showy, self-involved letter arrangement.  Alphabetical mayhem.  Vowels run amok!

At first glance, one might assume that this word was a product of those beautiful, “bonjour”-greeting, croissant-eating, Beaujolais-swigging French who never met a vowel they didn’t like.  Not so.  In actuality, it comes from the Greek words “onoma”, meaning “name”, and “poiein”, which means “to create”, thus “creating a name”, eventually evolving into today’s accepted definition: “the creation of words that imitate natural sounds.”  Its earliest known use in literature was by the English writer, Thomas Wilson, in his 1553 work, “The Arte of Rhetorique”.  In reality, though, the first uttered onomatopoeia was likely thousands of years earlier, before writing existed.  I checked, and ducks were around the same time as the cavemen, so you’ve gotta figure these guys were doin’ their best “QUACK” renditions from the get-go.

So yeah, I did a little research and found that we’re first introduced to the word, “onomatopoeia” early in elementary school, around 1st or 2nd grade with mostly animal sounds, and then learn how to identify and categorize them in stories and poems in grades 3-5, followed by refining our understanding in junior high as we use it in our own prose and poetry compositions.  And then?... beats me.  I guess maybe it came up in high school or even in college lit classes, but the fact is it eventually just faded away, proving to be as essential in real life as having the ability to recite the key dates in the American Revolution, spot a dangling modifier from a hundred yards, or somehow channel that infinite and non-repeating, mind-numbing decimal expansion called pi into something of actual use in our day-to-day lives.  And for all you historians, English professors, and mathematicians out there, my apologies.  It’s just that the vast majority of us have miraculously managed to get by so far without all the scholastic clutter.

Ahhh… and there it is, the real reason for even bringing up onomatopoeias in the first place: they’re, like, totally irrelevant, and yet, we were all force-fed them throughout school.  It really sticks in my craw, just like when you’d ask the teacher how to spell something and she’d tell you to look it up.  Damn, if only I’d had the foresight to utter, “Yeah, well, in the future they’re gonna have Spellcheck to do that for me so I’ll never have to spell again.  And, oh, by the way, AI’s gonna be gunnin’ for your job!”… So yeah, I’ve got issues.

Anyway, as I put this piece to bed this morning--my Rice Krispies’ SNAP, CRACKLE and POP, doin’ their thing--I hear the neighbor’s dog GROWL in reaction to the MEOW of a nearby feral cat.  I get a WHIFF of my coffee just as the DING of my microwave signals it’s heated.  A WHIRR from the fridge provides another distraction as I try to finish this up.  And then a CLAP of THUNDER followed by the PITTER-PATTER of rain on the window, all keeping me from concentrating on a button for this piece, a decisive sentence or two to sum up the total misapplication of my time in school studying the useless “onomatopoeia”.  TAPPING on the table nervously and MURMURING under my breath, the curtains FLUTTER in the breeze (damnit, a dangling modifier!).