I love this reflection on the worst words:
What word do you hate and why?’ is the intriguing question put to a selection of poets by the Ledbury festival. Philip Wells’s reply is the winner for me – ‘pulchritude’ is certainly up there on my blacklist. He even explains his animosity in suitably poetic terms:
“it violates all the magical impulses of balanced onomatopoeic language – it of course means “beautiful”, but its meaning is nothing of the sort, being stuffed to the brim with a brutally latinate cudgel of barbaric consonants. If consonants represent riverbanks and vowels the river’s flow, this is the word equivalent of the bottomless abyss of dry bones, where demons gather to spit acid.”
