Quotes & Sayings About Syllables

But he found himself rounding syllables like stones in his mouth, silently. He knew he was shy, and thought to be stupid; he was beginning to suspect, thought, that he wasn't stupid. Perhaps not even slow. Merely uneducated. But not, he hoped, uneducable. — Gregory Maguire

People don't talk like this, theytalklikethis. Syllables, words, sentences run together like a watercolor left in the rain. To understand what anyone is saying to us we must separate these noises into words and the words into sentences so that we might in our turn issue a stream of mixed sounds in response. If what we say is suitably apt and amusing, the listener will show his delight by emitting a series of uncontrolled high-pitched noises, accompanied by sharp intakes of breath of the sort normally associated with a seizure or heart failure. And by these means we converse. Talking, when you think about it, is a very strange business indeed. — Bill Bryson

When he frowned again, she was fairly sure that the nomenclature did not please him, and she found herself wishing she had been birthed to other syllables. — J.R. Ward

The fact is, that for the Huichol, and for all those who refuse, who are in flight, words and things are precisely what language does not speak about. Language is a natural act which implies belonging. He who exists, speaks. He who does not speak, does not exist. He has no place in the world. The Huichol language is Huichol to the same degree as the Huichol earth, the Huichol sky, religion, tattooing, dress, the peyoteros' hat. It is not enough to pronounce the syllables of the Huichol language to be Huichol. That is obvious. — Jean-Marie G. Le Clezio

I know I only want him,' she said between sobs, the syllables all wrong, 'because he doesn't want me. How is that even possible?'

'It's normal to want what we can't have,' I said soothingly.

'No, I mean how can he not want me? — Olivia Sudjic

They stormed and jeered at one another in long meaningless words of about twenty syllables each. — C.S. Lewis

Words so easily and yet unfortunately uttered by many, be it to express their appreciation of fried bits of potatoes to sports teams on the television. Words offered so frivolously about a variety of subjects and yet can be the most difficult, most painful, most meaningful, most cherished syllables we gift another person. — Heather Lyons

It seems to me that the contrast between adjacent syllables has lessened and the result is an over-reliance on enjambment. Now enjambment is a fine, intellectually strong aid, but like all such things it becomes tiresome and calls too much attention to itself. — Christopher Logue

Prostitution.' He enunciates the word clearly, gazing directly into her eyes, knowing, God damn it, that he is being cruel. In the back of his mind, a kinder William Rackham watches impotently as his wife is penetrated by that single elongated word, its four slick syllables barbed midway with t's. Agnes's cameo face goes white as she gulps for air. — Michel Faber

Some syllables are swords. — Henry Vaughan

To convey one's mood
in seventeen syllables
is very diffic — John Cooper Clarke

I looked into his eyes and then down at his mouth before continuing. "Have you ever noticed how pretty and beautiful words can be? How easy it is to say the things you think someone wants to hear. How you can affect a person's entire day with just a few measly sentences?"My slight smile dropped. "But when you don't follow them up with any action, they're completely pointless. They're just sounds and syllables. But they mean absolutely nothing." My gaze glossed over as my mind wandered. — J. Sterling

I tried out the unfamiliar syllables. They fit. They cracked in my ears like a fist through ice. — Louise Erdrich

Halt?" said Gilan, realization dawning. "You're not seasick are you?"
No," Halt said shortly, not trusting himself beyond one syllable.
Probably need a bite if breakfast to settle your stomach," Svengal said helpfully. "Gte something solid inside you."
Had ... breakfast." This time Halt managed three syllables-but with some difficulty, Svengal affected no notice.
Cabbage is god. Especially pickled cabbage. Sits on the gut nicely," he said. "Goes well with a nice piece of greasy bacon. You should try that if you ... "
But before he could finish, Halt lurched toward the ship's rail and hung over it. Dreaful noises were torn from him. Svengal, still affecting a look of innocence, turned to Gilan, hands spread and eyes wide.
What it the world is he looking for? Has he lost something, do you think? — John Flanagan

Just get the right syllable in the proper place. — Jonathan Swift

Some women get divorces on the grounds of incompatibility; others, on just the first two syllables. — Evan Esar

I love the language, it sounds as if it should be writ on satin with syllables which breathe of the sweet South — Lord Byron

Rhythm. Life is full of it; words should have it, too. But you have to train your ear. Listen to the waves on a quiet night; you'll pick up the cadence. Look at the patterns the wind makes in dry sand and you'll see how syllables in a sentence should fall. Arthur Gordon — Arthur Gordon

I want to see the thirst
inside the syllables
I want to touch the fire
in the sound:
I want to feel the darkness
of the cry. I want
words as rough
as virgin rocks. - Verb. — Pablo Neruda

There was our old life, in the apartment, in which we had time to finish most of the tasks we started and took long showers and remembered to water our plants. And there was our new life, in the hospital a mile away, in which Shauna needed morphine and two babies needed to eat every three hours around the clock ... I remember thinking, we're going to have to figure out how to combine our old life with our new life ... Over a year later, we still have days of mind-crushing fatigue, midnights when I think I'm pouring milk into a bottle but am actually pouring it all over the counter. Yesterday I spent five minutes trying to remember my parents' zip code. But now there are mornings like this one, when we wake up and realize we've slept through the entire night, and we stroll through the gardens as if we are normal again, as if we are finally learning the syllables of this strange, new language. — Anthony Doerr

I had a publisher who felt comics were just for little kiddies, so he never wanted me to use words of more than two syllables. — Stan Lee

Why save the rainforest, the whales, or the world when you can devote your time to saving syllables? — Lindsay Faith Rech

He swallowed. "That wager. Did anyone succeed?"
She stiffened slightly, and then her shoulders lowered in defeat. Now she did turn around.
"Oh, Mr. Carhart." It was the first time she had spoken his name since he'd returned, and she imbued those few syllables with all the starch of sad formality. "As I recall, I vowed to forsake all others, keeping only unto you, for as long as we both should live."
He winced. "I wasn't questioning your honor."
"No." She put her hands on her waist and then looked up at him. "I merely wish to remind you that it was not I who forgot our wedding vows. — Courtney Milan

Words whose sense is the most ill-defined are sometimes those that possess the most influence. Such, for example, are the terms democracy, socialism, equality, liberty, &c., whose meaning is so vague that bulky volumes do not suffice to precisely fix it. Yet it is certain that a truly magical power is attached to those short syllables, as if they contained the solution of all problems. — Gustave Le Bon

Five syllables," Apollo said, counting them on his fingers. "That would be real bad. — Rick Riordan

But when you don't follow them up with any action, they're completely pointless. They're just sounds and syllables. But they mean absolutely nothing. — J. Sterling

Fate loves best such syllables as are sweet and sonorous on the tongue. — James Russell Lowell

A year or two after emigrating, she happened to be in Paris on the anniversary of the Russian invasion of her country. A protest march had been scheduled, and she felt driven to take part. Fists raised high, the young Frenchmen shouted out slogans condemning Soviet imperialism. She liked the slogans, but to her surprise she found herself unable to shout along with them. She lasted only a few minutes in the parade.
When she told her French friends about it, they were amazed. "You mean you don't want to fight the occupation of your country?" She would have liked to tell them that behind Communism, Fascism, behind all occupations and invasions lurks a more basic, pervasive evil and that the image of that evil was a parade of people marching with raised fists and shouting identical syllables in unison. But she knew she would never be able to make them understand. Embarrassed, she changed the subject. — Milan Kundera

Poetry is a kinetic arrangement of static syllables. — Carl Sandburg

Stories heard but not recalled. Letters too. Words filling my head. Fragmenting like artillery shells. Shrapnel, like syllables, flying everywhere. Terrible syllables. Sharp cracked. Traveling at murderous speed. Tearing through it all in a very, very bad inreparable way. — Mark Z. Danielewski

Protested Mrs. Featherstone, a lady in her thirties, whose violently compressed figure suggested that she was engaged in a perpetual struggle to compute her weight in terms of the first syllables of her name rather than the last. — Dorothy L. Sayers

Mrs. Bittarcy rustled ominously, holding her peace meanwhile. She feared long words she did not understand. Beelzebub lay hid among too many syllables.
("The Man Whom The Trees Loved") — Algernon Blackwood

They left. Among the many dumb rules of paragraphing foisted on students in composition courses is the one that says that a paragraph may not consist of a single sentence. Wilkerson ends a richly descriptive introductory chapter with a paragraph composed of exactly two syllables. The abrupt ending and the expanse of blankness at the bottom of the page mirror the finality of the decision to move and the uncertainty of the life that lay ahead. Good writing finishes strong. — Steven Pinker

It's hard to find words to explain why you love someone, they don't make words with that much passion. And even if they did, there isn't a perfect combination of syllables and sounds to create a word strong enough to explain love. Love is just a filler word, a useless word that tries to do a job that no word can. — Kandi Steiner

A lot of things appearing under my byline were written in one draft. But when I started to write poetry, I started getting fussy about every syllable. I wouldn't allow the work to be seen unless it felt perfect. Not clunky at all, no clunky syllables. So, really, for the printed page, it had to have a feeling of rhythmic and syntactic verisimilitude or something. — Richard Meltzer

The most reserved of men, that will not exchange two syllables together in an English coffee-house, should they meet at Ispahan, would drink sherbet and eat a mess of rice together. — William Shenstone

One of the deep fundamentals of poetry is the recurrence of sounds, syllables, words, phrases, lines, and stanzas. Repetition can be one of the most intoxicating features of poetry. It creates expectations, which can be fulfilled or frustrated. It can create a sense of boredom and complacency, but it can also incite enchantment and inspire bliss. — Edward Hirsch

Every good gospel singer you can hear is a scat singer; they're just using different syllables. There are a lot of jazz singers out there, and more coming out of the churches. — Al Jarreau

In a certain way, it's the sound of the words, the inflection and the way the song is sung and the way it fits the melody and the way the syllables are on the tongue that has as much of the meaning as the actual, literal words. — David Byrne

The woman spoke with a heavy western North Carolina accent, which I used to discredit her authority. Here was a person for whom the word 'pen' had two syllables. He people undoubtedly drank from clay jugs and hollered for Paw when the vittles were ready
so who was she to advise me on anything? — David Sedaris

Some of the dairy people, who were also out of doors on the first Sunday evening after their engagement, heard her impulsive speeches, ecstasized to fragments, though they were too far off to hear the words discoursed; noted the spasmodic catch in her remarks, broken into syllables by the leapings of her heart, as she walked leaning on his arm; her contented pauses, the occassional laugh upon which her soul seemed to ride - the laugh of a woman in company with the man she loves and has won from all other women - unlike anything else in nature. They marked the buoyancy of her tread, like the skim of a bird which has not yet alighted. — Thomas Hardy

Yet the voice could take fright. This Kathy Kerouac foresaw only too well when syllables suddenly started coming out of her mouth like little fragments of oblivion giving her the impression she was contradicting herself. It was in these moments, when words were both true and false, solemn and light, on the tip of her tongue and deep in the throat, that space shrank in her mouth like a hard-felt blow. — Nicole Brossard

I have studied your lips
every line, dip and bend
and
have come to realize
one truth:
the way you move
is in perfect
unison with
the perk
and pout
of your mouth
orating coded syllables
only I can make out. — Adrian Michael

But should a sensation from the distant past-like those musical instruments that record and preserve the sound and style of the various artists who played them-enable our memory to make us hear that name with the particular tone it then had for our ears, even if the name seems not to have changed, we can still feel the distance between the various dreams which its unchanging syllables evoked for us in turn. For a second, rehearing the warbling from some distant springtime, we can extract from it, as from the little tubes of color used in painting, the precise tint-forgotten, mysterious, and fresh-of the days we thought we remembered when, like bad painters, we were in fact spreading our whole past on a single canvas and painting it with the conventional monochrome of voluntary memory. — Marcel Proust

My parents said I'd always been attracted to music from an early age. The classic story is I started singing before I talked. My Mom would play me tapes, and I'd be able to sing them back perfectly. She said my pitch was dead on, but I'd fill in nonsense syllables for all the rest of it. The words would be all garbled, because I didn't know how to talk yet. — Vienna Teng

Democracy has become, unless I mistake, a kind of test or shibboleth, by which we try men and measures; and this is the same as to say that it is merely a word which is powerful with us, and not the wide and true notion of what the word means. But we must define the true import of words, and not be slaves to syllables; for democracy in form is not necessarily people-power in fact, but power perhaps of a few, who cajole the many and so lead and use the people for their own ends. — James Vila Blake

Spy' is such a short ugly word. I prefer 'espionage.' Those extra three syllables really say something. — Howard Tayler

Cahoots.' He repeated the word, forming the syllables with exaggerated motions of his lips. 'Lovely word, that. The kind of word that's necessary to use, purely for the pleasure of saying it. — Terry Pratchett

These syllables, about 2,300 in number, were mixed together and then drawn out by chance and used to construct series of different lengths, several of which each time formed the material for a test. — Hermann Ebbinghaus

Everything she wanted to tell her, was unable to tell her, because she was afraid of hearing her own voice come out of her heart and be covered with blood, and then she poured all the blood into these syllables, and she offered it to her to drink like this : You have it. — Helene Cixous

Can there really be a form of verse where all that counts is the number of syllables in a line? No patterning of stress at all? What is the point?
Well, that is a fair and intelligent question and I congratulate myself for asking it. — Stephen Fry

At somewhere around 10 syllables, the English poetic line is at its most relaxed and manageable. — James Fenton

I cannot too often repeat that Democracy is a word the real gist of which still sleeps, quite unawakened, notwithstanding the resonance and the many angry tempests out of which its syllables have come, from pen or tongue. It is a great word, whose history, I suppose, remains unwritten because that history has yet to be enacted. — Walt Whitman

When people want to sound smart, they add syllables to words, words to sentences, sentences to paragraphs, paragraphs to books. They try to make up in quantity and complexity what they lack in quality. That's bullshit! They're just hiding their bullshit! — Robert McKee

Lin-da." He parted the syllables very slightly, as with a comb. — Emily Fridlund

What is a spell after all but a way of coaxing syllables together so persuasively that some new word is spelled ... some imprecision clarified, some name Named ... and some change managed. — Gregory Maguire

So often we think that to be encouragers we have to produce great words of wisdom when, in fact, a few simple syllables of sympathy and an arm around the shoulder can often provide much needed comfort. — Florence Littauer

She would have liked to tell them that behind Communism, Fascism, behind all occupations and invasions lurks a more basic, pervasive evil and that the image of that evil was a parade of people marching by with raised fists and shouting identical syllables in unison. — Milan Kundera

Poetry is a projection across silence of cadences arranged to break that silence with definite intentions of echoes, syllables, wave lengths. — Carl Sandburg

He cleared his throat and held up one hand dramatically.
"Green grass breaks through snow.
Artemis pleads for my help.
I am so cool."
He grinned at us, waiting for applause.
"That last line was four syllables." Artemis said.
Apollo frowned. "Was it?"
"Yes. What about I am so bigheaded?"
"No, no, that's six syllable, hhhm." He started muttering to himself.
Zoe Nightshade turned to us. "Lord Apollo has been going through this haiku phase ever since he visited Japan. Tis not as bad as the time he visited Limerick. If I'd had to hear one more poem that started with, There once was a godess from Sparta-"
"I've got it!" Apollo announced. "I am so awesome. That's five syllables!" He bowed, looking very pleased with himself. — Rick Riordan

The way of Jesus is thus not a set of beliefs about Jesus. That people ever thought it was is strange, when we think about it - as if one entered new life by believing certain things to be true, or as if the only people who can be saved are those who know the word "Jesus". Thinking that way virtually amounts to salvation by syllables.
Rather, the way of Jesus is the way of death and resurrection - the path of transition and transformation from an old way of being to a new way of being. To use the language of incarnation that is so central to John, Jesus incarnates the way. Incarnation means embodiment. Jesus is what the way embodied in a human life looks like. — Marcus J. Borg

She wanted to hold foreign syllables like mints on her tongue until they dissolved into fluency. — Anthony Marra

Because,' he said, like both syllables hurt. — Rainbow Rowell

i swallowed the syllables of your name
and i was full. — AVA.

He stood there unsteady in the cold, mumbling syllables which almost resolved into her name, as though he could recall, and summon back, a time before death entered the world, before accident, before magic, and before magic despaired, to become religion. — William Gaddis

We are only syllables of the perfect Word. — Caryll Houselander

Simplicity itself. Skin, debone, demarrow, scarify, melt, render down and destroy. Every adjective that counted, every verb that moved, every metaphor that weighed more than a mosquito
out! Every simile that would have made sub-moron's mouth twitch
gone! Any aside that explained the two-bit philosophy of a first-rate writer
lost!
Every story slenderized, starved, bluepenciled, leeched and bled white, resembled every other story. Twain read like Poe read Shakespeare read like Dostoevsky read like
in the finale
Edgar Guest. Every word of more than three syllables had been razored. Every image that demanded so much as one instant's attention
shot dead. — Ray Bradbury

It doesn't matter how simple your name is; it's always a surprise to hear it spoken aloud by someone new, how the specific arrangement of syllables sounds coming out of their mouth. — Katie Heaney

MEEEEE!" it bellowed.
She jumped back again, dropping the basket lid. What the devil?
She opened it again, and looked down at the wee thing.
"MEEEEEE!"
"Good heavens, you are loud," she told it. "I thought cats were supposed to say 'meow.' There are two syllables in meow."
"MEEEEEE!" It corrected vehemently and with great singularity. — Julie Anne Long

This universe can very well be expressed in words and syllables which are not those of one's mother tongue. — Tahar Ben Jelloun

Poetry is the journal of the sea animal living on land, wanting to fly in the air. Poetry is a search for syllables to shoot at the barriers of the unknown and the unknowable. Poetry is a phantom script telling how rainbows are made and why they go away. — Carl Sandburg

Find the pitch and pace and syllables and words you love to hear. Delight your own senses, and self-romance. — Alexandra Katehakis

Previously known for its six syllables of sweetness and light, reconciliation has become the political fighting word of the year. — William Safire

In our own lives the voice of God speaks slowly, a syllable at a time. Reaching the peak of years, dispelling some of our intimate illusions and learning how to spell the meaning of life-experiences backwards, some of us discover how the scattered syllables form a single phrase. — Abraham Joshua Heschel

Ah, love, this is fear. This is fear and syllables
and the beginnings of beauty. — Robert Hass

Uninvited, the thought of you stayed too late in my head,
so I went to bed, dreaming you hard, hard, woke with your name,
like tears, soft, salt, on my lips, the sound of its bright syllables
like a charm, like a spell.

Falling in love
is glamorous hell; the crouched, parched heart
like a tiger ready to kill; a flame's fierce licks under the skin.
Into my life, larger than life, beautiful, you strolled in.

I hid in my ordinary days, in the long grass of routine,
in my camouflage rooms. You sprawled in my gaze,
staring back from anyone's face, from the shape of a cloud,
from the pining, earth-struck moon which gapes at me

as I open the bedroom door. The curtains stir. There you are
on the bed, like a gift, like a touchable dream.

"You — Carol Ann Duffy

To write poetry is to be very alone, but you always have the company of your influences. But you also have the company of the form itself, which has a kind of consciousness. I mean, the sonnet will simply tell you, that's too many syllables or that's too many lines or that's the wrong place.So, instead of being alone, you're in dialogue with the form. — Billy Collins

It normally happens that if you put two words together, or two syllables together, one of them will attract more weight, more emphasis, than the other. In other words, most so-called spondees can be read as either iambs or trochees. — James Fenton

He unpacks his bag of tales
with fingers quick
as a weaver's
picking the weft threads
threading the warp.
Watch his fingers.
Watch his lips
speaking the old familiar words:

"Once there was
and there was not,
oh, best beloved,
when the world was filled with wishes
the way the sea is filled with fishes..."

All those threads
pulling us back
to another world, another time,
when goosegirls married well
and frogs could rhyme,
when maids spoke syllables of pearl
and stepmothers came to grief.

.... (from The Storyteller poem) — Jane Yolen

Egypt loved the lotus becuase it never dies. It is the same for people who are loved. Thus can something as insignificant as a name-two syllables, one high, one sweet- summon up the innumerable smiles, tears, sighs and dreams of a human life. — Anita Diamant

Just as little as a reader today reads all of the individual words (let alone syllables) on a page - rather he picks about five words at random out of twenty and "guesses" at the meaning that probably belongs to these five words - just as little do we see a tree exactly and completely with reference to leaves, twigs, color, and form; it is so very much easier for us to simply improvise some approximation of a tree. Even in the midst of the strangest experiences we will still do the same: we make up the major part of the experience and can scarcely be forced not to contemplate some event as its "inventors." All this means: basically and from time immemorial we are - accustomed to lying. Or to put it more virtuously and hypocritically, in short, more pleasantly: one is much more of an artist than one knows. — Friedrich Nietzsche

Once I was lost in a forest. I was so afraid. My blood pounded in my chest and I knew my heart's strength would soon be exhausted. I saved myself without thinking. I grasped the two syllables closest to me, and replaced my heartbeat with your name. — Anne Michaels

It is no secret. All power is one in source and end, I think. Years and distances, stars and candles, water and wind and wizardry, the craft in a man's hand and the wisdom in a tree's root: they all arise together. My name, and yours, and the true name of the sun, or a spring of water, or an unborn child, all are syllables of the great word that is very slowly spoken by the shining of the stars. There is no other power. No other name. — Ursula K. Le Guin

Daddy
and it contained within it the prospect of living and the hope of dying, of endings and beginnings, of love and loss and peace and rage, all wrapped up in two whispered syllables. — John Connolly

Syllables govern the world. — George Bernard Shaw

A laboratory analogy to repression can be found in an experiment by A.F. Zeller.
Zeller arranged a situation so that one group of students underwent an unhappy "failure" experience right after they had successfully learned a list of nonsense syllables. When tested later, these subjects showed much poorer recall of the nonsense syllables compared to a control group, who had not experienced failure. When this same "failure" group was later allowed to succeed on the same task that they had earlier failed, their recall showed tremendous improvement. This experiment indicates that when the reason for the repression is removed, when material to be remembered is no longer associated with negative effects, a person no longer experiences retrieval failure. — Elizabeth F. Loftus

Just that one word - sound - sent a strong answering pulse through her body. His tongue curled around syllables that weren't there, like a promise. This is what you'll get, if you just let me hear. — Charlotte Stein

Mrs. Ferrars was a little, thin woman, upright, even to formality, in her figure, and serious, even to sourness, in her aspect. Her complexion was sallow; and her features small, without beauty, and naturally without expression; but a lucky contraction of the brow had rescued her countenance from the disgrace of insipidity, by giving it the strong characters of pride and ill nature. She was not a woman of many words; for, unlike people in general, she proportioned them to the number of her ideas; and of the few syllables that did escape her, not one fell to the share of Miss Dashwood, whom she eyed with the spirited determination of disliking her at all events. — Jane Austen

The more syllables a euphemism has, the further divorced from reality it is. — George Carlin

Sweetheart, darling, dearest, it was funny to think that these endearments, which used to sound exceedingly sentimental in movies and books, now held great importance, simple but true verbal affirmations of how they felt for each other. They were words only the heart could hear and understand, words that could impart entire pentameter sonnets in their few, short syllables. — E.A. Bucchianeri

Though the words Canada East on the map stretch over many rivers and lakes and unexplored wildernesses, the actual Canada, which might be the colored portion of the map, is but a little clearing on the banks of the river, which one of those syllables would more than cover. — Henry David Thoreau

I discover poetry when I was in elementary school and I was so fascinated by it. Because I realised if you get the right amount of syllables and the right amount of words, in the right rhyme scheme and you put it all together. You make words just bounce of a page. — Taylor Swift

Perhaps there is something in this reflected-sound-of-underground-spirits? It was a cumbersome phrase. Rincewind tried to get his tongue around the thick syllables that were the word in Twoflower's own language.
"Ecolirix?" he tried. "Ecro-gnothics? Echo-gnomics?"
That would do. That sounded about right. — Terry Pratchett

Sully suffers from a stutter,
simple syllables will clutter,
stalling speeches up on beaches
like a sunken sailboat rudder.
Sully strains to say his phrases,
sickened by the sounds he raises,
strings of thoughts come out in knots,
he solves his sentences like mazes.
At night, he writes his thoughts instead
and sighs as they steadily rush from his head. — Bo Burnham

In a society in which equality is a fact, not merely a word, words of racial or sexual assault and humiliation will be nonsense syllables. — Catharine A. MacKinnon

November arrives in Northern Maine on a cold wind from Canada that knives unfiltered through the thinnest forest, drapes snow along the river banks and over the slope of hills. It's lonely up here, not just in fall and winter but all the time; the weather is gray and hard and the spaces are long and hard, and that north wind blows through every space unmercifully, rattling the syllables out of your sentences sometimes. — Gerard Donovan

No worries, Atticus. I will snarf surreptitiously. And I should get bacon, because my adverb was two syllables longer than yours, plus a bonus for alliteration."
I grinned. "It's a deal. You're the best hound ever. — Kevin Hearne

Dogs should be called by names which are not very long, so that each may obey more quickly when he is called, but they should not have shorter names than those which are pronounced in two syllables ... — Columella

There are so many different ways for someone to say your name. I'm not sure I ever realized that before I met Jesse. Prior to him, it was just Rose calling out to me with love and affection or Gideon relaying his quiet approval or disapproval. Crisp, clear notes. When Jesse says my name, it's a chord, a mash-up of several intense emotions all reflected in two syllables. — Paula Stokes

I cannot say your worships have delivered the matter well when I find the ass in compound with the major part of your syllables [ ... ] our very priests must become mockers if they shall encounter such ridiculous subjects as you are. When you speak best unto the purpose, it is not worth the wagging of your beards, and your beards deserve not so honorable a grave as to stuff a botcher's cushion or to be entombed in an ass's packsaddle [ ... ] more of your conversation would infect my brain, being the herdsmen of the beastly plebeians. I will be bold to take my leave with you. — William Shakespeare