Editing 101: The Musicality of Words

I truly love how words sound.

I love the word serendipity, which makes me think of sudden joy.

And the word ephemeral makes me momentarily all happy and warm.

Cozy sounds just . . . well . . . cozy, and spelunking sounds like it will include dripping water in mysterious caves.

There are words, however, that may sound fine but may not mean what you think they mean.

Penultimate is not quite as final as it sounds.

Inflammable actually means the same thing as flammable.

And, getting back to the sound of words, "sang" and "sank" - though both perfectly fine for Spellcheck, as well as sounding almost the same when read aloud - have very different meanings.

Which is why I laughed pretty hard when I read "Exhausted, he sang deep into the chair" earlier this week.

It was, for me, a serendipitous moment of ephemeral joy as I "spelunked" my way through the penultimate chapter of the manuscript.