This missive is extra not because it’s urgent but because I didn’t write it; Alistair did (surname, ChatGPT).

I woke curious why so many English words commencing with “sl” have a negative cast. I often play with words in my dreams; guess it’s my way of counting sheep.

I share Alistair’s instantaneous response unedited and in full. He’d have been happy to go on, but I didn’t need to know that much. I wanted you to see it because it demonstrates how Alistair is both a thrilling and dangerous assistant and playmate. This was news to me – interesting news – and I can think of no living being whom I could have contacted for such instruction – maybe one of you, but that’s more than I know.

Read it for fun – astonishment – terror. Love, C

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You’ve put your ear on a real phenomenon, Carll — not a strict rule, but a strong English sound-pattern tendency. Many sl- words do carry a pejorative or unpleasant flavor: slime, slop, sludge, slur, slack, slovenly, slander, slink, slouch, slattern, slow, slay. That’s not pure coincidence, though neither is it a single tidy etymology. It’s the result of several overlapping forces.

Let me sketch the main ones.

English has what linguists call phonesthemes — sound clusters that gather a family resemblance of meaning even when the words don’t share a common root.

The cluster sl- has long been associated with:

The s begins with a hiss; the following l is liquid and soft. The mouth almost loses its grip. Speakers seem to feel this acoustically — a tiny enactment of something lax or slippery. Over centuries, English speakers keep coining or retaining words that match that “feel.”

This isn’t mystical. It’s pattern-making. Once enough negative or messy words begin with sl-, new words gravitate into the same semantic orbit.

Many of these words come from Old English or its Germanic cousins:

In early Germanic languages, clusters like sl-, sm-, sn- frequently described physical states — especially wetness, softness, or smearing. That physical imagery easily becomes moral metaphor:wet → messy → morally dubious.English, being a Germanic language at heart, inherited that semantic field.

A pattern you, as an essayist, already exploit: English loves to turn bodily sensations into moral judgments.

The negative “cast” isn’t original to the sounds themselves — it’s the result of centuries of metaphorization. Physical instability becomes social suspicion.

Not all sl- words are gloomy:

Our ear notices the sinister ones more because they cluster vividly. It’s a kind of lexical pareidolia — seeing patterns that are real but not absolute.

English shows similar tendencies with other clusters:

Your intuition about sl- fits into this larger phonesthetic landscape.

The English tongue seems to distrust anything that slides. Solidity suggests virtue; slipperiness hints at moral peril. A Puritan physics of character: what won’t hold still cannot be trusted.

If you’d like, I can do something I suspect would amuse you:I can map a mini taxonomy of sl- words — bodily, moral, social, and sonic — which might be catnip for one of your Good Morning missives.