In the Weekly Standard, Joseph Bottum writes about words that sound like what they mean; words that ring true in and of themselves, and not only in an onomatopoeic sense. He gives examples like squeamish, fluffy and lethargic, and comes up with a term for such words, namely “agenbites,” and explains why. At the First Things blog he’s been soliciting other examples of the phenomenon. OK, I’ll bite, on agenbites.

How do you go about looking for them? Well, I think you have to open a book, preferably a book of poetry or even of song lyrics, where words are being used in a concentrated and careful way.

A few minutes got me a short list of words that seem righter than most.

Gallant seems to me to be a word with a certain gallantry to it.

Growl and howl are clearly almost as good as the things themselves.

Mist has a character that could fog up your mirror just by saying it.

Thunder sounds right, yelled in a deep voice from a mountain-top.

Flat seems to me to be just so.

Sip and the rarer sup are enough to make me wish some people could eat and drink more quietly

Linger appropriately hangs around the tongue for quite some time.

Muck arrives like a splash of the very same stuff on your pant leg. (I obviously am thinking of it in the sense of mud and other wet dirty yucky stuff. However, when you think about it, muck has a variety of usages and meanings. There is the phrase “to muck around,” and then there’s the concept of a grand muckety-muck, closely related to the poohbah. Muck is so flexible it can’t help bringing to mind another four letter word ending in uck. )

Not a million miles from muck is mush, which seems aptly soft and spreadable.

Well, I think I’ll leave it right there, before I get carried away and muck everything up.

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