Word Feel

Like food, sentences have mouthfeel. It has less to do with the content of a sentence and more to do with the flow of words strung together. JRR Tolkien was a big advocate for mouthfeel, designing his elvish languages to have crisp feels while the Black Speech is a very back-of-the-mouth language (this was intentional, as Tolkien found those sounds unpleasant and wanted to make a language he thought was ugly.) The principles of word feel apply to Earth languages as well, the Romance languages largely considered pleasant to the ear while the Germanic languages (what with their hard consonants) are often considered harsh and throaty. I find that I’m particularly sensitive to English word feel; a sentence may be 100% grammatically correct but can feel entirely alien once said allowed. Most of the time it’s something small, such as a “that that” or multiple adverbs in a sentence. Other times the sentence structure is so inherently wrong that I can’t place what about it that bothers me. It kind of feels like grainy chicken, right in every way except for texture.

My favorite sentence of all time is “Buffalo buffalo Buffalo buffalo buffalo buffalo Buffalo buffalo.” It’s grammatically correct and has great mouthfeel (to me) but goddamn you if you try to figure out what it means. Another word with great mouthfeel is “crisp,” it starts in the back of your mouth and travels continuously out past the lips without going back into your mouth. A close second to “crisp” is “brisk,” which is almost it’s exact opposite.

An example of bad mouthfeel would be any sentence that contains “all of a sudden.” Those four words subscribe to the “eliminate all adverbs” philosophy but they just sound so sloppy. Case point, which sounds better spoken aloud: “A deer suddenly jumped out from the brush” or “a deer jumped out of the brush all of a sudden.” The first sentence has better flow (to me) but you can feel free to be wrong prefer the second variation. Mouthfeel is, after all, a matter of preference with some agreements shared among most everybody: sentence structure can be clumsy, sand feels bad on your palate.