Kalamazoo and waltzing and australopithecines, these are a few of my favorite things

According to my mother, my favorite word at age two was banister. Whenever going down stairs, I had to tell everyone that they had to hold on to the (big inhale to get ready for the word) banister.

A year later, having seen Anne of Green Gables several dozen times, my favorite word became chrysanthemum, mostly because I could spell it and no one else could. When my friends and I played school, I would give spelling tests that included words like cat, dog, no (I was also an expert speller of n-o n-a-p!), and, of course, chrysanthemum. It wasn't until I forced my sister to sit through the movie with me that someone else I knew finally figured out how to spell it. I didn't care that I hadn't the slightest idea what a chrysanthemum was, my ability to spell it clearly proved my superiority to other preschoolers.

There was a very long stretch of time in high school where my favorite words were Kalamazoo, willow, and waltz. My life got especially exciting every summer in high school when I'd go to Kalamazoo for an ice dance clinic, where I'd be working on dances like the Willow Waltz. And seriously, you need to cheer yourself up? Just say Kalamazoo once or twice, and you can't help but smile.

My favorite word since last fall has been australopithecine. I was required to learn all about australopithecines for my Anthropology class last fall, and about the only thing I remember is that australopithecine is really, really fun to say (it may or may not be the case that I remember nothing else because Karisa and I spent the entire semester doing sudoku, crossword puzzles, and making snide comments about how our professor knew nothing about linguistics).

Now comes the fun part: a linguistic analysis of favorite words! Feel free to skip the next two paragraphs if you, for some odd reason, don't want a short linguistics class. Several of my favorite words were my favorites simply because they were long and unusual. Okay, banister isn't super long or super unusual, but pretend you're three. There, now it seems a little more long and unusual. Unless you're a gardener, you don't go around talking about chrysanthemums, and you'd have to be a very single-minded anthropologist to find a way to use australopithecine in a regular conversation.

The second category my favorite words fall into is that of words with letters that are perceived as being interesting. Kalamazoo and waltz both have z in it, and even though that phoneme (or sound) is really frequent in the English language (you say it in houses, dishes, lads, and really most of the plurals out there where the singular form ends in a vowel or a voiced consonant), I for some reason see the letter as being really exciting. As for willow, the consonants are either liquids (l) or glides (w). Not a single stop in the word! Very exciting stuff.

So, what's your favorite word? Is it your favorite because of what it means, or because of how it sounds? Anyone adventurous enough to do their own linguistic analysis of their favorite words?