According to all the cognitive neuroscientists, the essential gift of the human race is our ability to attach complex meanings to sounds.Here’s a shocker for you: the written language was developed only to make the spoken language permanent. In fact, the written word has no meaning until it has been translated into the spoken word it represents. This is why it takes the average reader 38 percent longer to understand the written word than to understand the same word when spoken.Think about it. Do babies learn to speak first, or to read first?You’re lying in bed, reading a book. It dawns on you that you’ve been scanning the same paragraph over and over but you have no idea what it says. This is because the part of your brain connected to your eyes is still receiving the visual symbols we call the written word, but you are no longer hearing those words in your mind.Stay with me. An understanding of this stuff will make your ads musical, memorable, and persuasive even when they’re being read silently off a computer screen or from a printed page.The English language is composed of only 43 sounds.*These sounds are called phonemes and they are the parts and pieces of words. Be careful not to think of them as letters of the alphabet.Not every letter of the alphabet has its own sound. The letter “c” usually indicates the “k” sound, but we give it the “s” sound when it is followed by an “i”.A single phoneme can be represented by different combinations of letters. The phoneme we hear as “sh” can be heard in the word fish, but we also hear it in fictitious, where it is created by a “t” followed by an “i.”Fictitious fish.Don’t focus on the spelling of the word in question; it is the sound of the word we’re after.Phonemes are important to ad writers because they carry unconscious, symbolic meanings of their own. The black-and-white definition of a word is softly colored by its sound. A great ad writer would never call a diamond “small.” Because small is dull. Small, at best, would glow, like a pearl.But Diamonds fling jagged shards of light.This is why we write, “tiny little diamonds twinkling, glitt’ring and sparkling in the sun.” The sharp-edged “t” and “k” sounds are what we’re after.In the musical fabric of language, every sound is important. What distinguishes large and small from big and little is the difference in their musics. Phonemes within a language are like the instruments in an orchestra. Just as the drums make a different kind of music than do the woodwinds, and the woodwinds make a different kind music than does the brass, so also do the drum-like stops – like p,b,t,d,k, and g – (don’t read that list as letters of the alphabet; make the sounds the letters represent,) make a different music than do the woodwind-like fricatives, the sounds that hiss or hush or buzz – like f, v, s, z, sh, th. And the fricatives make a different music than the brassy nasal velars, like the “ng” sound in song, tongue, string and bring.Phonemes are either obstruent or sonorant.Obstruents are perceived as harder and more masculine; sonorants as softer and more feminine. Big and little are obstruent, perfect for diamonds that fling jagged shards of light. Large and small are sonorant, just right for clothing made of soft fabric.Now are you...