Word Values

Over in another place, Roy mentions that grille (and banana) are two of his favourite words.

Something else I was just writing made me think of the way in which certain words have value judgements attached to them. This is an unfortunate fact of life that people of colour know only too well, of course. Actually, context is everything. If someone is black hearted we tend to think of them as pretty evil. But if beige is the new black, that's meant to be a good thing. Buddy Holly sang of a Brown Eyed Handsome Man; Van the Man sang of a Brown Eyed Girl; the Velvets sang of Pale Blue Eyes.

I just used the word transparent, meaning it was a good thing in audio signal processing, because it worked, but that you didn't notice it working. On the other hand, if someone has bad motives and you know it, transparent is not so good (for them, anyway). Opaque is usually an indication of obstuseness, both with negative connotations, though if you fell over and cracked your head, and obtuse surface would be better than a sharp (or acute) one, because then you'd end up with an acute injury in intensive care.

It's been said before, elsewhere, but our language has a paucity of descriptive metaphors for any of the senses other than sight. I'm talking about sound, but I use the word transparent. Why isn't there a word like transparent for sound? Or feelings? Why is that?

So what are your favourite words? One of my top ones is anaconda, which is a word I often doodle. I like all the as in it.