"… take the word 'giggling'. A one-word harvest of play's superfluity, its liquid, lovely over-indulgence, it has g's to spare, (g, the funniest consonant. You want proof? Gnu. Gneed I say more?) and it fills the gaps with 'i' -- the quickest, wittiest, lickspittiest, trippiest and lightesthearted of all the vowels."

"… Living languages are self-propagating, spawning seed syllables, stretching ambiguously, syntactically tactile, diffuse and suggestive as sex itself, abundant, panglossolalic, profligate, vocative, evocative and provocative. Now slippery with fictive fascination; now stiff with austere truth; now tickled with trenchant absurdity; language luxuriates in a careless, splendid, inefficient uproar I AM ALIVE."

The above excerpts are from "Pip pip: a sideways look at time" by Jay Griffiths (Flamingo 1999). A wonderful read!