 As anyone who's studied a second language knows, the relationship between a word and the concept it carries is arbitrary. When I say the word pencil, there's nothing inherent in the sound of that word or the way that it's written that is pencil-like. We call it a pencil because of convention. Everyone who speaks English has learned that the sound pencil means this thing. In German, the same thing is referred to as a bleistift. And in Spanish, it's lapis. And in Bengali, it's pencil. And again, there's nothing inherently bleistiffy or lapis-y or pencil-y about a pencil. As the great linguist Ferdinand de Saussure observed over a century ago, there is never a singular natural relationship between a word and the concept that it signifies. Otherwise, we'd all be speaking the same language. Words don't mimic the natural world. They've replaced that natural world with a series of arbitrary sounds and signs that help us to process it. But wait a second. What about a word like boom, or chuckle, or hiccup, or cock-a-doodle-doo? These words seem to mimic what they represent out there in the world, the sounds of explosions, laughter, hiccups, and roosters. The literary term for these kinds of words is onomatopoeia, from the Latin, onama, meaning name, and poin, meaning to make. But instead of making or using arbitrary words to signify some unrelated thing like a pencil, when we speak in onomatopoeias, we're using words that sound like the things they describe. Boom sounds an awful lot like, well, this. Does this mean that some words do have a natural relationship to the world out there? So Cyr takes up this question in his course in general linguistics, published in 1916. And his answer is, well, not exactly. After all he reasons, onomatopoeias sound different as we move from language to language. In English we say cock-a-doodle-doo to describe the crowing of a rooster. In French, however, the word is co-co-reco, and in German it's key-carry-key. The same goes for hiccup, which is uke, in French, in ipo, in Spanish. Now, French and German roosters probably don't have French or German accents. And people around the world all probably hiccup in the same way. So what accounts for these differences? What Cyr concludes is that we understand the sounds that we hear out there in the world, not only through the actual sound of a rooster, a hiccup, or an explosion, but also through the languages that we know. Onomatopoeias are therefore strange words that mimic the sounds of the natural world at the same time as they're shaped by the languages that we speak. And this is what makes them so fascinating to poets and other literary authors. To my mind, the most interesting forms of onomatopoeia are to call attention to this relationship between sound and language. I'm thinking here of words and phrases that produce what's called an onomatopoetic effect, even if the words are not themselves strictly speaking onomatopoeia. Let me give you one example. William Carlos Williams' 1946 poem The Injury opens with the following lines. From this hospital bed, I can hear an engine breathing somewhere in the night. Soft coal, soft coal, soft coal. Williams' speaker is listening to the engine of a train here, which takes in soft coal in the same way that we inhale oxygen to breathe. But Williams' metaphor stretches into the realm of onomatopoeia and the repetition of the last lines, soft coal, soft coal, which mimics the chuffing of a coal-fired steam train. The words themselves, soft and coal, would never be considered onomatopoeia. Instead, they work like normal words, their arbitrary sounds for two different concepts. But by placing them in sequence within the poem, Williams brings forth a surprising sound that is both natural and linguistic. In this way, his poem shows how onomatopoeias align the sounds of the world out there with the words that we use to understand that world. If you have any other examples of onomatopoeia or onomatopoietic effects, I hope you'll share them with me in the comments section below. Happy reading, everybody.