Friday, August 19, 2016

Cthulhu the functional?

Jake Linford has recently expounded in detail about the descriptive or even functional characteristics of certain sounds, making certain "coined" words more useful in marketing.  Here's a great example from Michael Saler, As If: Modern Enchantment and the Literary Prehistory of Virtual Reality (2012): "Some critics found these names ridiculous, but Lovecraft countered that 'a coined word which has been shaped with great care from just the right associational sources' could be effective, evoking sensations from Symbolist poetry. 'Cthulhu' was self-evidently le mot juste."

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