Nevada County Picayune and Gurdon Times Newspaper Archive

Word of the Week: Cacaphony

My head is still swirling from the visual cacophony of the veritable sea of cardboard boxes that are swimming in our garage! This business of getting ready to move is not for the faint-hearted or the physically challenged. It might actually make you temporarily physically challenged; it has done it to me.

Sharp-witted soul that you are, you probably noticed a vocabulary treasure buried in my whining. The word cacophony is a neat little word that can be used as intended or in a more figurative way, like I just did.

Cacophony comes to us from the Greek word, kakophtnia. It breaks down easily into: kakos, which means bad or evil and phtng, which means voice or sound.

Putting them together, we have the resultant cacophony, which can simply mean, harsh sounding.

My home-brew pronunciation guide/ kah-koffin-knee /Im sure that you have heard some music that would fall under the undesirable heading of cacophonous music, havent you?

I also remember the cacophony of sounds in my high school band room as we all warmed up on different pieces of music at the same time. But the word cacophony doesnt have to be limited to bad-music  it can also refer to any annoying collection of irritating sounds. For instance 

The jam-packed streets of New York City are filled with a blur of swiftly moving pedestrians and the cacophony of horns honking and drivers yelling at each other.But cacophony can also be used in another way, too  in the visual sense that I used above.

The website www.dictionary.com gave this example for this visual usage, Hideous as in, And yet amidst this hideous visual cacophony, occasional insights can be observed; and these can be of an almost revelatory intensity.

Hope you enjoyed this weeks fun vocabulary word!