Fortunately, I have never used the word “tintinnabulation” in conversation in my entire life. I don’t recall ever using this word in anything I have written, either. I do recall reading the word in a novel and having to stop so I could look up the meaning in an old-timey unabridged dictionary – you know, the big book teachers made bratty kids hold over their heads when they disrupted class.
In
the event you are unfamiliar with “tintinnabulation,” it is a noun representing
a ringing or tinkling sound. This is not a word that exactly rolls off the
tongue and actually strikes me as something that might have been invented by a
committee of drunken metallurgists.
Frankly,
I think the word “tinkling” is just fine and doesn’t need any help from
tintinnabulation. And tinkling also has the added benefit of providing the
following double entendre: “I tinkled when I went outside.” Anyhow,
tintinnabulation popped into my head while I was, of all things, chopping
onions and more or less crying. And now I am thinking we can run with the word
tinkling from here and throw tintinnabulation out with the onion skins.
—Mitchell
Hegman
Onion skins can color Easter eggs!!!!!!!
ReplyDeleteWow! I did not know that.
DeleteEdgar Allen Poe invented tintinnabulation in his poem “The Bells”. In England and in some places in the US still there is a quaint custom of bell ringing. This requires a bell tower with at least four bells or a group of people using hang bells. People pull the bells in the towers in a mathematical rotation leaving one bell out the rotation each round. Poe likely belonged to such a group when living in Baltimore.
ReplyDeleteI you read the poem out loud, after all it is a sound poem, you will likely never get the word tintinnabulation out of your vocabulary.
Hmmm. I may need to take a run at that poem.
Delete