Phonaesthetics
The semantics of "cellar door" derive straightforwardly from its component terms: in the United States, a cellar door is often a door or pair of shutter doors between the outside of a building and its cellar. In Britain, Ireland and Canada, a cellar door is often located within a house and opens onto a flight of stairs leading to the cellar. Outside doors are more common to pubs and restaurants.
From the nineteenth century, many American houses on large plots had slanted trapdoors abutting the side and opening onto a flight of steps leading down into the cellar. By the mid-twentieth century this rustic feature was a rarity; in 1953, William Chapman White wrote in the New York Herald Tribune:
- "The modern small home or apartment has ... deprived today's child of ... the pleasant summer afternoon activity of sliding down cellar doors. Just what happened to the slanted cellar door in this efficient age isn't clear; although cellars have remained, nothing has disappeared more quietly from modern life than these cellar doors."
Geoff Nunberg suggests the use of such a semantically banal term to illustrate the idea of beauty appeals to aesthetes as "an occasion to display a capacity to discern beauty in the names of prosaic things".
Nunberg suggests the phonetic characteristics of "cellar door" are relevant, not for purely auditory reasons, but by phonological association with languages imbued with romantic preconceptions:
- it at once brings to mind a word from one of those warm-blooded languages English speakers invest with musical beauty, spare in clusters and full of liquids, nasals, and open syllables with cardinal vowel nuclei — the languages of the Mediterranean or Polynesia, or the sentimentalized Celtic that Lewis and Tolkien turned into a staple of fantasy fiction
Nunberg further suggests the semantics of "cellar door" are not actually irrelevant; in fantasy, a mundane door can become a portal to another world, as with the wardrobe of The Lion, the Witch and the Wardrobe or the rabbit hole of Alice in Wonderland. This idea is utilized in the 2001 film Donnie Darko, where the phrase "cellar door" is discussed in one scene, and an actual cellar door figures into the plot in a later scene.
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