Laudator Temporis Acti

Gilbert Highet (1906-1978), Explorations (New York: Oxford University Press, 1971), p. 112:

One variation of this idea appeals to me, although I know it is not to be taken seriously. This is the notion that some words, when they are written or printed, look like the thing they denote. My favorite is pool, where the two o's evoke the deep water with its reflection of the sky, and the downward stroke of the p and the riser of the l resemble the tree reflected in the still lakelet. Moon is also very good. Meat looks to me like a slab of tenderloin oozing with juice; and now that I think of it, ooze looks like something oozing and the word juice both looks and sounds like juice. The printed word potato is very like a big lumpy Long Island potato with two bumps on it. Bulb is just right, whether it means an electric bulb narrowing upwards to its neck, or a bulgy tulip bulb. Tulip is pretty good too, both in sound and in appearance. The r's in mirror seem to me to mirror the shiny surface of the mirror. Ankle and elbow both resemble bent joints. Tongue looks like the flexible boneless organ which curls and has a thin projecting tip. Dante thought a man's face looked like the old Italian word for man: omo, the strong bony nose being the M and the two round O's the eyes on each side of it. One scholar claimed that Hungarian was the ideal language because the Hungarian word for scissors, ollò, looked exactly like a pair of scissors. Stop. Stop! That way madness lies!