bluecliffrecord

The field of phonaes­thet­ics con­cerns it­self with the re­la­tion­ship be­tween beauty and the spo­ken word; eu­phony and ca­coph­ony. And you may have heard the claim that, out of all com­bi­na­tions yet con­sid­ered, “cel­lar door” takes the top spot as the most beau­ti­ful pair of words in the English lan­guage.

If I could ex­pand that pair to a trio, I might nom­i­nate the ti­tle of a book that’s oc­cu­pied a space on my shelf for a long time: the Blue Cliff Record, a clas­sic book of Zen koans, verses, and com­men­tary. Considering I’ve never made it past the first hun­dred pages or so, I think I own this book as much for the beauty of its ti­tle as any­thing else. It strikes a mys­te­ri­ous bal­ance be­tween mean­ing and non­sense (where ex­actly are these blue cliffs?), as all the best writ­ings on Zen tend to do.

Willow.
Cellar door.
Blue cliff record.

is-ness

Consider also: the Socratic Hypothesis and the in­her­ent mean­ing of words.

There are at least two as­pects to what we have tra­di­tion­ally called the mean­ing of a word. One as­pect is ref­er­ence, and the other is some­thing I will call ‘inherent mean­ing’ fol­low­ing Ullman (1963). Inherent mean­ing is ‘Is-ness’ mean­ing. Inherent mean­ing is a word’s iden­tity, and ref­er­ence merely its re­sumé, where it has gone and what it has done, an item­iza­tion of its con­texts. ‘Is-ness’ is uni­fy­ing. Each word has a sin­gle pro­nun­ci­a­tion, a sin­gle in­her­ent mean­ing. But ref­er­ence is di­vi­sive. It makes what was one thing — the word — ap­pear to be many things — its senses. It is in­her­ent mean­ing which gives all those mul­ti­far­i­ous senses the power of be­ing a sin­gle word.

Margaret Magnus, Gods of the Word