Onomatopoeia

For those who never learned or perhaps have forgotten, onomatopoeia, in addition to being one of the most misspelled words in the English language, are words that are intended to convey noises or sounds. Think pow or ka-pow from the Batman comic books of old. The existence of onomatopoeia reminds us that in any exclusively visual medium such as writing, whether it be text only or illustrated like comic books or graphic novels, there are very few ways to convey the sound a thing makes. Essentially there is analogy to something else that makes a similar sound, perhaps physical/bodily reactions, and onomatopoeia. I am leaving out formalized systems of representing sounds like musical notes because they are only understood by a small subset of people and are generally only applied to specific types of sounds (i.e. musical sounds). None of those options does a very good job in my estimation and together they illustrate just how difficult it is to translate a sound into words or any other visual format in a way that truly captures the essence of it. The difficulty ultimately springs from the fact that all of those options for describing a sound, rely on a different sense, vision, to interpret. If one examines the other senses it quickly becomes clear that translation between any one of them to any other suffers from similar problems though the degree of difficulty varies with the diversity of language that has been developed to describe the particular sense in question. For example, for myself at least, it is easier, though still not easy, to describe how something tastes then how something sounds. This is primarily because many more words are available to describe the taste of a thing than the sound of a thing. That is interesting in its own right, but it becomes even more interesting when one realizes that words are also the only way to convey sight in an exclusively auditory medium. In that case the words must be spoken or written in a form that can be interpreted by another of the senses, like braille. In addition, words are the only option to convey taste in an exclusively taste based medium, if there were such a thing. The same of course goes for touch. In fact it is the case that it is not possible to describe any sense experience to another person (and maybe not even to oneself) without language and words.

This is of course a thing that has been discussed and debated ad nauseum by philosophers and everyday people throughout the ages. It is one of the things which makes writings so powerful, and just one of the many reasons why it is such a useful skill to foster and develop. Onomatopoeia also happens to be a lot of fun to say and to try and use in your writing. Using it, both the word and the technique, cleverly requires much wit and wisdom and it is an interesting thing to challenge yourself to find new and different ways it might be employed. Here is just one example from my own work. Now if I could just come up with a good onomatopoeia for the sound my hand makes when it smacks against my head in frustration each time I finish a perfectly good story only to discover I have not yet hit the magical six hundred word minimum for publication here on Vocal. I would suggest something like thwack but it seems played out and cliche. How does crichswak sound? Or, maybe I should say how does it look? Now that's a headscratcher isn't it?