Tuesday, September 7, 2010

Mm: mellifluous

adj.
1. Flowing with sweetness or honey.
2. Smooth and sweet: "polite and cordial, with a mellifluous, well-educated voice" (H.W. Crocker III).

[Middle English, from Late Latin mellifluus : Latin mel, mell-honey; see melit- in Indo-European roots + Latin -fluusflowing; see bhleu- in Indo-European roots.]


In context: Ezra Pound (from Gaudier-Brzeska, 1916)
When I find people ridiculing the new arts, or making fun of the clumsy odd terms that we use in trying to talk of them amongst ourselves; when they laugh at our talking about the "ice-block quality" in Picasso, I think it is only because they do not know what thought is like, and they are familiar only with argument and gibe and opinion. That is to say, they can only enjoy what they have been brought up to consider enjoyable, or what some essayist has talked about in mellifluous phrases. They think only "the shells of thought," as de Gourmont calls them; the thoughts that have been already thought out by others.

So in this context the words mellifluous phrases means, phrases that are pleasant, phrases that make good dinner party conversation, words that have spoken by others and are well accepted.  



 

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