Talk:Cellar door (phrase)

message: Great phrase yes? — Preceding unsigned comment added by 71.35.179.131  (talk • contribs) 05:49, 7 August 2005
Yes, IMO :) --Missmarple 09:08, 7 August 2005 (UTC)
replies: text: Personally, I think that "cellar door", while it may be cute and perhaps should be kept as a redirect, is a pretty bad title for this article. I personally spent a while looking for the subject matter before getting to it here only because it was linked from the inherently funny word article and I clicked on cellar door out of curiosity. Gzuckier 21:25, 5 December 2005 (UTC)
thread_title: Untitled

message: What about the 'cellar door'-reference in Donnie Darko?
The article refers to Drew Barrymore telling Donnie Darko, but one is named as a real person, the other by the character, it should be the characters names and if required with the Actor's name in brackets beside it.
Celador is the actual word, which means a ward or guard.
121.215.152.54 (talk) 05:52, 31 October 2010 (UTC)
thread_title:  Donnie Darko 

message: Surprise... there are indeed prior notices of the phrase 'cellar door' being an especially beautiful or musical phrase. One of them turns out to be Mencken:
Poetry is two distinct things, and may be either or both. One is a series of words that are intrinsically musical, in clang-tint and rhythm, as the words cellar-door and sarcoma are 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.
Prejudices: third series - Page 151 
(The Poet and His Art, the very first paragraph)
by H. L. (Henry Louis) Mencken - 1922
Some other authors have also noticed this, but they might be following Mencken, who seems to have the earliest reference. (The Mencken reference and these are all found via 'Google in Book')
Poets of America - Page 311
by Clement Wood, Edmund Clarence Stedman - 1925 - 392 pages
An Italian once picked "cellar door" as the most beautiful combination of words
in English. It is only needful to recall the music wedded to meaning of ...
Snippet view - About this book
The World, the Arts and the Artist - Page 49
by Irwin Edman - 1928
"Cellar door," remarked a foreigner who had no knowledge of the meaning of 
English words, "is the most beautiful word I have heard in the English language. ...
Snippet view - About this book
Potable Gold: some notes on poetry and this age - Page 33
by Babette Deutsch - 1929 - 96 pages
Dissociated from its significance, "cellar door" forms three cool clear liquid
syllables such as might ...
Snippet view - About this book 
—The preceding unsigned comment was added by 64.31.91.76 (talk) 20:36, 24 January 2007 (UTC)
thread_title:  Prior references 

message: I think that the Stephen King reference of the cover photo of a cellar door is not related in any way to the phonetic beauty of the words. If we let that in, then every cellar door anywhere should be added (please no!) TheCharlie 16:40, 16 February 2007 (UTC)
thread_title:  Excessive Cultural References 

message: "Cellar Door is the name of a stunning new Jazz and Cabaret Venue under London's Strand next to the Lyceum Theatre. The venue is truly unique and has proven hugely popular as one of the most intimate bars in the Capital.(www.cellardoor.biz)"
This sounds more like an advertisement than actual information.
^ In response to the above, I made a suggested alteration. Feel free to revert. Burnley219 15:14, 7 April 2007 (UTC)
thread_title:  Other 

message: Hi, does anyone know about research on how the point of articulation influences the feeling of sounds? Cellar door is only made of alveolar consonants; my favourite example of alveolar consonants is New Zealand Story which contains all the alveolar phonemes in the English language. --Kjoonlee 16:46, 31 May 2007 (UTC)
thread_title:  [[Point of articulation]] 

message: Surely all those references need to be linked to this use of "cellar door". Otherwise it is original research.  —Preceding unsigned comment added by Beardo (talk • contribs) 14:49, 8 September 2007 (UTC)
thread_title:  References 

message: This article was automatically assessed because at least one WikiProject had rated the article as start, and the rating on other projects was brought up to start class. BetacommandBot 03:50, 10 November 2007 (UTC)
thread_title:  WikiProject class rating

message: It doesn't make sense for it to start with 'Nonetheless' or does it?  —Preceding unsigned comment added by 203.109.206.227 (talk) 05:00, 20 November 2007 (UTC)
replies: text: hm, yes, this is a leftover from unclean refactoring, I think dating to a time when the article wasn't sure whether to credit Tolkien. Please fix it. dab (𒁳) 19:10, 1 December 2007 (UTC)
thread_title:  Misattributions piece 

message: The RP is out of context here because RP is non-rhotic, meaning that the sound "r" is not pronounced. But of course, the reason why Tolkien found the phrase "cellar door" beautiful is because it contains three liquid consonants, including the two rhotic sounds. So the pronounciation for this particular phrase should include both "r".  —Preceding unsigned comment added by 132.216.28.167 (talk) 01:09, 20 January 2008 (UTC)
replies: text: Well, at most one rhotic sound, if it suggested him the name Selador... Goochelaar (talk) 23:40, 28 January 2008 (UTC)

text: Not true. The word 'cellar-door' contains no instances of the /r/ phoneme. If it's followed by a word beginning with a vowel, an epenthetic phonetic [r] is automatically inserted, but there's no reason to posit this in the word itself, at any level. The phoneme /ɔ:/ is spelt in numerous ways: tall, launch, jaw, pour, poor, oar, ore, taught, sort, possibly others too. The reason Tolkien wrote Selador is no doubt that that is the closest Sindarin equivalent - *Selado would not get the vowel right, whereas Selador with a rolled [r] would be anglicized as his own pronunciation [ˈselədɔ:] (for the Sindarin country-name, versus two-stressed [ˈseləˌdɔ:] for the English word); and *Seladaw, while looking right for the English, would give a very different Elvish sound. One qualification needs to be made: it is possible Tolkien's speech was old-fashioned enough to consistently distinguish, say, law and from lore and by only inserting epenthetic [r] in the latter, i.e. where historically an /r/ had once existed. If so, and if this was a natural part of his speech, then an underlying /r/ is justifiable. However, I doubt whether this distinction was a natural one for many people even in his own day. – unsigned comment by near-RP speaker and linguist 194.217.93.82 (talk) 12:31, 25 June 2008 (UTC)
thread_title:  Received pronounciation is here out of context 

message: its more than a phrase. there are actual things called cellar doors, why does this article not talk about an actual cellar door, like a bilco door?  —Preceding unsigned comment added by 70.210.85.161 (talk) 05:11, 11 August 2008 (UTC)
replies: text: It's ridiculous that Wikipedia has a bunch of articles using the word "cellar door" yet no article on the actual thing. Not even a Bilco article. Kortoso  (talk) 20:53, 15 September 2017 (UTC)
thread_title:  Actual cellar door

message: Is this supposed to ever happen?!?!?!?! --Ysangkok (talk) 21:38, 25 October 2008 (UTC)
thread_title:  Discussion mentioned in article 

message: There is no need to have the line saying that "basement" is the American English for "cellar." "Cellar" is used just as frequently and is understood exactly the same in American English as it is in any other dialect.   — Preceding unsigned comment added by 97.89.242.208 (talk) 05:20, 18 March 2012 (UTC)
replies: text: I would not recommend adding this material to the article. See WP:OR.--Hq3473 (talk) 14:15, 12 January 2009 (UTC)
thread_title:  etymology of the words "cellar door" 

message: Celador is also the Spanish for "guard". Sir George Mackenzie's 1665 tract "On Solitude" addresses the reader:
:My dear Celador, enter into your own breast, and there survey the several operations of your own soul, the progress of your passions, the strugglings of your appetite, the wanderings of your fancy, and ye will find, I assure you, more variety in that one piece than there is to be learned in all the courts of Christendom. 
Passage underlined in Herman Melville's copy of Isaac Disraeli's Curiosities of Literature Which is probably a complete red herring as regards "cellar door". Now if it was Edgar Allen Poe's copy.... jnestorius(talk) 21:32, 27 February 2010 (UTC)
thread_title:  Red herring? 

message: The photograph of an actual cellar door, which clearly represents meaning rather than sound, is inappropriate to illustrate an article cocerning  phonoaesthetics, which does not concern meaning. The photograph should be removed, and possibly replaced by a beautifully-pronounced audio recording of the phrase. David Spector (talk) 00:01, 12 June 2010 (UTC)
replies: text: Disagreed. Although the article is not strictly about the portal to a basement, the sound is specifically the result of reading these two words in English. Since this article is not about the random sound "Selador", but about two words which make that sound, it stands to reason that a picture of their namesake represent it. 68.96.52.9 (talk) 19:08, 8 February 2014 (UTC)

text: I agree with David (as can be seen in my edit summary). The article is not about any physical object; it’s not about the door to a cellar. Photographs don’t likely belong in articles about words-as-words. —174.141.182.82 (talk) 15:23, 6 September 2014 (UTC)
thread_title:  Inappropriate image 

message: Several issues, who is "my" opinion? This entire section is purely subjective. I think a discussion of the aesthetic appeal of the word is a good idea, but it should be framed differently. Gmlawton (talk) 03:59, 21 July 2012 (UTC)
replies: text: I don't know how this sad excuse for an article ever came to be. Kortoso  (talk) 20:48, 15 September 2017 (UTC)
thread_title:  The why the phrase is beautiful section. 

message: delete this subjective shit
its proven s,d,g,n sound ugly
what is pronounced at most is most beautiful
thus mayday, may lay, may tay  r beautioful
85.26.183.243 (talk) 17:07, 9 January 2013 (UTC)
replies: text: If you can provide sources for this contrary subjective view, then please do. Because we have sources backing up the claim that this phrase is beautiful. —174.141.182.82 (talk) 15:26, 6 September 2014 (UTC)
thread_title:  pov 

message: 'A passage from J. R. R. Tolkien's 1955 essay "English and Welsh" has been cited as the origin of the idea:'
Cited where? GeneCallahan (talk) 22:41, 4 August 2015 (UTC)
thread_title:  Tolkein 

message: Several of the alternative spellings appearing in this section (Sileduur, Cellador, Salladhor, Selidor, Celador, Cellador) have no citations to any reliable sources linking them with the phrase cellar door. How do we know that these names have anything at all to do with cellar door? —Sangdeboeuf (talk) 09:26, 23 January 2017 (UTC)
thread_title:  Respellings 

message: The article says, "C. S. Lewis wrote in 1967..."  The year can't be correct; Lewis died in 1963.  The quote in question does indeed appear in the collection "Letters to Children".  I don't remember if that collection includes the dates of the individual letters.  — Preceding unsigned comment added by 73.79.7.88 (talk) 22:51, 23 March 2017 (UTC)
replies: text: . Date , with sources. —Sangdeboeuf (talk) 00:09, 25 March 2017 (UTC)
thread_title:  Lewis 

message: There is a move discussion in progress on Talk:Cellar door (disambiguation) which affects this page. Please participate on that page and not in this talk page section. Thank you.  —RMCD bot 13:02, 21 September 2022 (UTC)
thread_title:  Move discussion in progress