ELI5? Why do some letters sound more menecing than other letters to pronounce?

2.50K views

I saw the office and when dwight said “R is one of the most menecing letters. Thats why they call it murder, not mukduk.” Ive been wanting to know the science behind that.

In:

2 Answers

Anonymous 0 Comments

What I can tell you is that a hard “R” pronounciation of words like wuh-R-duh (for word) used to be considered barbaric. The British pronunciation (and accent) is propper English.

My assumption is that over the course of history, it has been culturally passed down that a hard “R” is menacing considering that it used to be “barbaric”.

Anonymous 0 Comments

Are they? Has any studies been done or are we basing this off of an anecdote from a TV series and taking it as fact. I did a quick bit of an interweb search and couldn’t find any conclusive except for similar based question based on Dwight’s quote. Not convinced it’s a thing and wouldn’t be sure how to explain it.