Cellar Door

“The claim that cellar door is beautiful to the ear — in opposition to its prosaic meaning — has been made by and attributed to a wide variety of writers over the years. “Poetry, in fact, is two quite distinct things,” H. L. Mencken wrote in a 1920 magazine column. “It may be either or both. 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.”… More recently, the superior sound of cellar door was mentioned in the 2001 movie “Donnie Darko,” in which a cellar serves as a time-twisting portal. In one scene, the main character, Donnie, sees the phrase on a schoolroom chalkboard. He asks his teacher why it’s on the board, and she explains that the words are thought to be especially lovely, vaguely attributing the idea to a “famous linguist.” ” – the New York Times