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

[Laurence Horn]

On Mar 17, 2014, at 1:52 PM, George Thompson wrote:

> 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.

Does anyone know the story behind the other names for those slanty hatchway doors to the basement?  I've heard with some regularity both "bulkhead door" and what I always processed as "bilko door".  I assumed that the latter was a reduction of the former influenced by the good (TV) sergeant of that name, but now checking Google I find that Bilco® door is actually a trade-name.  But which came first, the Bilco door or the (Sgt.) Bilko < Bulkhead door?

>
> 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.

Isn't that a standard differentia for -ist vs. -ite?  (Granted, the Trotskyist/ite pair may have been a major factor in how those suffixes got that way.)

LH
>
> 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

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