Grant Barrett explores why people think that some words sound more beautiful than others and lets H.L. Mencken explain the twofold appeal of cellar door: “One is a series of words that are intrinsically musical, in clang-tint and rhythm, as the single word cellar-door is musical. The other is a series of ideas, false in themselves, that offer a means of emotional and imaginative escape from the harsh realities of everyday.” In other words, it’s not just the melody but also the word’s connotation that make it sound beautiful.
The connotation of a word is a subjective coloration, often based on emotional associations. Hence, Barrett concludes, it actually would be more sensible to find the sound of closed cellar door beautiful. Oh well, this depends.
One of the best books I have read in a long time is The Book Thief, the story of a German girl living in Bavaria during the Nazi regime. Her foster parents hide Max, a Jewish man, in their cellar. Shortly after he arrived, Liesel is asked to pay him a visit. “Papa was motioning that she should follow him down to their old workroom. The basement. ‘But, Papa,’ she tried to tell him. ‘We can’t –’ ‘What? Is there a monster down there?’” In a way there is. Liesel knows that what her parents are doing is dangerous, and this “danger” lurks down there.
In dream analysis, which interprets the house as an image of the self, the cellar or basement may symbolize the dreamer’s unconscious. According to Freud, we hide there any socially unacceptable - or base - ideas and painful emotions, just like Liesel's parents hide Max in the cellar. It indeed seems more sensible to keep the door closed.
Liesel and Max, however, become friends, and much later, after he had left, “She wanted to read a book in the basement, for old times’ sake.” The cellar and its door have lost their horror; instead they have acquired the tenor of solitude and dreams – and a positive connotation.
Connotation refers to the wide array of positive and negative associations words carry with them, whereas denotation is the precise, literal definition of a word that might be found in a dictionary. The connotative meaning is influenced by own individual experience as well as by one's culture – and sometimes even signifies more ore less overt prejudices. Just imagine a person who, as a young child, was bitten by a dog. For this person, the word dog will always carry a negative connotation. Politics, too, is loaded with connotations. For instance, conservatives are for some just old people who don’t want to change anymore, for others followers of the political doctrine that government should be involved in private business and live as little as possible. At the same time, the word socialist is sometimes uses as a derogatory term, implying that the person is a communist in disguise - a heimlich communist, while for others it simply indicates that someone prefers an equal distribution of wealth to a society in which only a few own the lion’s share. Writers can easily fall into this trap of ambiguous associations if they are not certain whether their audience shares their frame of reference.
But what is a heimlich communist? Heimlich is a German word which “is not unambiguous, but belongs to two sets of ideas, which, without being contradictory, are yet very different: on the one hand it means what is familiar and agreeable, and on the other, what is concealed and kept out of sight” (Freud, “The Uncanny”). Heimlich [Heim = home], referring to something related to one’s home, can connote something comfortable and familiar, a feeling of intimacy and privacy. Yet, heimlich also implies a contrast to the public sphere and, therefore, something that is hidden from the outside world. What became Liesel's heimlich and homey sanctuary, once had been Max's heimlich and hidden vault. The word's twofold connotation, however, gets lost in translation.
Some words, fortunately, have a sheer positive connotation. For Dorothy Parker, they were check and enclosed – something we all can understand.
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