Onomatopoeias and interjections: An example of their application in poetry and comic strips

Generally speaking, certain situations and contexts are hospitable to onomatopoeia while others are practically impervious to it. The more restrained, neutral and realistic varieties of style used by scientists, diplomats, civil servants, businessmen, etc., have little or no room for onomatopoeia. In these unemotional forms of speech expressiveness would be out of place and is rarely used. On the other hand, it flourishes in emotional and rhetorical speech whose general effect helps to reinforce it.

The expressiveness of certain sound combinations typical of some words may influence a writer in choosing names for his characters. One would suppose, for example, that a writer would use the name Mr. Bludge (/bl/= blowing and /2 ˆ= heaviness) for a fat, cowardly, heavy, corpulent character who has got a very high opinion of himself, lax and awkward. Many comic or grotesque effects have been obtained by giving characters a particular name. Some writers even admit feeling an analogy between the meaning of certain words and their visual shape.

It is also common place in spontaneous, unsophisticated and expressive forms of language such as baby talk, colloquial and popular speech, dialect and slang. Poetry is, for example, a eld in which these words are used and therefore the poet and also the writer of artistic prose exploit these resources to the full.

Because of their capability in transmitting sound effects, these words are also used in cartoons, where a particular immediateness of action is required in order to make an unreal and violent ambiance, such as that of comic strips, real.

First, the use of onomatopoeias in the poetry of Gerard Manley Hopkins is described in Chapter 6. Then their use in the world of comics will be taken into consideration together with interjections in Chapter 7.