"Slide down my cellar door" --> "most beautiful word" myth?

[George Thompson]

Back in ca. 1963, when I was a college Trotskyist planning for the
overthrown of the capitalist system, the pretty young woman who was the
director of the YSA group I was in used the name "Celdora Green" for her
revolutionary name.  She signed it to my membership card, which I have
since deposited in the Tamiment Archive.  She chose it because she had read
that "cellar door" had been proposed as the most beautiful phrase in
English.

And, yes, Wilson, back home in Meriden, Conn., a cellar door was the
slanting flap at the side of the house that covered the steps down to the
vertical door the opened into the cellar.

Note: Revolutionary Prescriptivism required that we refer to ourselves as
"Trotskyists", because "Trotskyite" was the term preferred by the
Stalinists to belittle the followers of Comrade Trotsky.

GAT

GAT


On Sun, Mar 16, 2014 at 11:42 PM, Geoffrey Nunberg <
nunberg at ischool.berkeley.edu> wrote:

> I have a post on LanguageLog (http://wp.me/pevV2-2TC) about this phrase,
> originally from two 1894 songs. I make it a possible (to my mind, even
> likely) source of the "most-beautiful-English-phrase" myth that Grant
> Barrett explored. Independent of that, until the mid-20th century the
> phrase served as  a cliche to evoke both innocent friendship and childish
> truculence, as in
>  If you see my friend Prince Krapotpin tell him I should be glad to have
> him holler down my rain barrel or slide down my cellar door any time. It is
> a hard thing to be a czar. Oak Park (IL) Argus, 1901
>
> William Waldorf Astor seems to have carried into maturity the youthful
> feelings so beautifully expressed in ballads of the " you can't slide down
> my cellar door " school. Munsey's magazine, 1901
>
> The post itself was a bit long for this list, though that would probably
> be its natural venue.
>
> Geoff
>
> ------------------------------------------------------------
> The American Dialect Society - http://www.americandialect.org
>



--
George A. Thompson
The Guy Who Still Looks Stuff Up in Books.
Author of A Documentary History of "The African Theatre", Northwestern
Univ. Pr., 1998..

------------------------------------------------------------
The American Dialect Society - http://www.americandialect.org