more than anything i hate golf

People like – or dislike – words for the way they sound or the associations they conjure, but some are also influenced by the way a word looks.

For example, many find something humorous about the letter k.

Pickle. Dunk. Monkey. Kalamazoo. Yank.

Funniest is the initial silent k, as in knackwrust or knuckle. What is so funny about that? I don’t know, but there’s an air of stupidity about it, no? To get really stupid, when someone wants to make a joke of his shop, he screws the spelling to include k: Kwik Kleaners or Kute Gifts. Poor k!

I like a doubled vowel, as in leer and deep. Even better than the double e is double o. To some extent, it’s also funny. Think of the word tube. It’s not funny. But the word loop is. Since tube and loop have the same vowel, it’s not sound here, it’s spelling. Other double o’s are also funny, like doodle, toot, boob, poodle and oodles. And why is cartoon not cartune? Because!

You’d think double o words were formed for the sake of a laugh. But there’s another class of double o words that ooze of mystery and have nothing funny about them. Think room. Such a big little word. Also smooth and broom and groom. Cocoon. Soundwise, it helps if the double o is followed by a vocalized consonant. But it isn’t absolutely necessary. I find a weird spaciousness also in root and soot, for example, and soot isn’t even pronounced with the long /u/.

Somewhere the buried knowledge of how the word is spelled affects me even when I’m neither reading nor writing it. As much as I dig root, route leaves me lukewarm. And while I like June, pursuit, newt and chute, they’d be different altogether with a double o.

One might say it’s only because the double o looks so cool. But that’s not it entirely. Also leer is more interesting than, say, near. Wheel is more intriguing than weal, and between would beat betwene, even though there’s something sweet about the latter. Dopey and sweet.