Loquacious: "The Diphthong 'Thang'" by Jodi Paloni

Loquacious: full of excessive talk : wordy (www.m-w.com)

Loquacious is a "wordy" series that revels in language. Read more essays in the series here.

During the editing of this guest essay, Jodi Paloni told me, "I took out the parts you suggested and guess what I found? Sex!" This does not surprise me at all.

Let me explain. Jodi and I met in grad school, and it seemed like every reading we attended together inevitably featured someone (usually a man) reading a piece that involved a sex scene (usually badly written) or descriptions of the female form (usually vulgarly expressed). It became a running joke between us, and now we can't help but think of the other when we hear certain bawdy slang terms. Jodi mock-threatened to write a guest post in this same vein, but I'm pleased to say that she's done something delightful and not at all in bad taste: written a useful essay on the craft of writing with a fun and sexy flair. Jodi's short stories often center on the tension that occurs when innocence flirts with something darker, a penchant you'll see in the fantastic examples she created for this essay. Here's looking at you, diphthong, you sexy thang!  

The Diphthong "Thang"

By Jodi Paloni

Lately I am taken with words that sport the illustrious diphthong. Sounds kinda sexy, right? Because they are. A diphthong is a vowel team that creates a monosyllabic gliding, slippery sound, or simply stated: two vowels, one sound. Consider words like roil and embroil, enjoy and destroy, blouse and scout, pouch and slouch. Consider frowning clown, or even simpler words such as boy and out. They make your lips purse and curl and pucker.

They cause the tongue to slow down.

Take a word listed above and find a non-diphthong replacement. Roil: churn. Enjoy: delight. Blouse: shirt. Then think about how you want your word to heighten the landscape of your sentence and to what effect. Consider the following:

When the borrowed doll slipped from her hand into the muddy river, her stomach roiled.

When the borrowed doll slipped from hand into the muddy river, her stomach churned.

The word that fits best depends on the passage. Do you want the character's experience to linger in the slithering sounds of the word roil, as if a moment longer could prolong the denial of her consequences? Or do you want the character to face her mistake with an abrupt realization, an abruptness that the word churned, with its harsh and final sounds, conjures up?

Here's another:

He imagined the feel of the fabric buttons sliding through the narrow slits of her blouse, as if practicing the art of undressing would help to calm him when his actual opportunity arose.

Exchange the word blouse for shirt. Blouse creates a slow-moving, sensuous action, which is what this sentence is about. (It also alliterates with other words that have that same slow, sensuous feel: blossom, blowing, blood.) Shirt, on the other hand, implies, to me, an everyday quick-and-dirty that may take little imagination at all.

Or, consider a combination of sound-play:

She stepped from the river having rescued the filthy doll, her shirt clinging to her torso like the vines on Aunt Edith's house, the vines that twirled the ladder giving her nightly access to my room.

The hard sounds of the underlined words, stepped, rescued, twirled, nightly, deliver action. The passion of the current moment (no pun intended) suggests a future possibility in the dark of night. Torso, house, and access are the soft words here. Shirt keeps the movement tense and up-close. Exchange shirt for blouse, and slow it down. By playing around with both soft and hard sounds, you can push and pull, speed up and slow down, seduce or ravage, all in one sentence.

All of this, of course, is subjective. The writer is the artist. Each word and every combination will inspire unique pleasure in the reader.

I will add that I also admire diphthongs because they stretch the rules of basic phonetics in which one letter makes one sound. Breaking rules can be sexy, too.

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Jodi Paloni's writing appears or is forthcoming in Whitefish Review, R.kv.r.y Quarterly, Carve Magazine, upstreet, Monkeybicycle, Spartan, Shadowbox Magazine, and The Lascaux Review. In 2012 she placed second in the Raymond Carver Short Story Contest. She lives and writes in southern Vermont and holds an MFA in Writing from Vermont College of Fine Arts. Jodi curates the forum 365 Short Stories in 2013 in which she reads and comments on one short story a day at Rigmarole.