A Happy Mistake

I was listening in arbitrary fashion to a programme about archaeology on the BBC World Service this afternoon whilst driving to Clementi Mall. An archaeologist with a strong German accent was being interviewed and his enthusiasm for his field was delightfully infectious. As I started to focus on the interview he was talking of the beautiness of one of the objects he'd recently rescued from the earth and I was taken by the force of the term, despite its surface lack of correctness. He'd paused when saying the word, as if struggling with the language, and that added to its peculiar charm.

But as the interview went on I couldn't help but notice just how fluent a speaker of English he was. True he uttered occasional mildly clumsy phrases but nothing so obviously wrong as the above. I began to suspect he had known perfectly well that beautiness wasn't actually a word and had decided to make it one in his own surreptitious manner. 

I must say, I'm glad he did. The term conveys something more than the object he was describing as being merely beautiful. It suggests the object functioning as a deliberate manifestation of the quality of beauty in a transcendent manner, as if attaining a significance beyond more than its limited physical self. Writing that I'm aware of how ponderously long-winded and pretentious my last sentence sounds, which is why I like the term beautiness so much since the clumsy mistake of a word does its work by accident.