In Western languages and literatures, there is a whiff of childishness about onomatopoeia and what we consider excessively expressive terms. The German-British linguist Max Müller wrote in 1862 that they ‘are the playthings, not the tools of language’. And in 1910, French anthropologist Lucien Lévy-Bruhl adduced ideophones as evidence that in ‘inferior societies’, the natives have an ‘irresistible tendency’ to ‘imitate all one perceives’. It’s important to realise that the use or avoidance of such words is a cultural preference, not a universal. As Westerners, we would be taken aback if instead of ‘God smote the Philistines’ we were to read that he ‘whacked’ or ‘walloped’ them. Western missionaries translating the Bible into non-Western languages avoid such expressive terms, but in many languages this is a stylistic choice that weakens rather than strengthens the impact of the text. In East and Southeast Asia and Africa, very far from being childish, the effective use of ideophones is a mark of eloquence and literary sophistication.