That Word Writers Love but No One Says in Real Life
It was there as the Torrence family was terrorized in Stephen King's The Shining:
The hummings and clankings and thumpings were louder here, terrifying in a disconnected, benumbed way. Jack was staring at the closed door with feverish intensity. Through the diamond-shaped window in the center of the elevator door she thought she could make out the cables, thrumming slightly. The elevator clanked to a stop below them, at lobby level. They heard the doors thump open.
It was there when when Sheriff Holston exited the silo in Hugh Howey's Wool:
Holston found himself at the bottom of a concrete ramp, a ramp that led up. His time felt short—there was a constant reminder thrumming in the back of his skull—hurry! Hurry! His life was ticking away.
It was there when physicist Jason Dessen was abducted in Blake Crouch's Dark Matter:
It's so quiet in the car I can actually hear my pulse—a fast thrumming against my eardrum.
It seems that whenever I open the pages of a book it's lurking in there somewhere: the word "thrum".
Yet, narrated books aside, I've never heard this word spoken out loud by anyone in real life. Not in personal conversation. Not in TV shows or movies. Not in lectures or interviews. But it's constantly there on the written page.
It's in thrillers, like Michael Crichton's Micro:
Rick and Karen reached the circle. They could hear a deep thrumming sound—the pulse of robot propellers around them.
And detective novels like Ben Winters's World of Trouble:
I swing around, moving quickly now, heartbeat thrumming...
It's in David Byrne's sonic exploration, How Music Works:
Rhys Chatham and Glenn Branca created similar soundscapes for massed guitars—wonderful experiences that evoke the thrum of a highway overpass or a steel foundry.
And the social science research of Jean Twenge's iGen:
Many parents and educators worry that teens' constant smartphone use, especially the constant thrum of social media and texting, has created an emotionally fragile generation prone to depression.
It's in Andrew Ross Sorkin's economic history, 1929:
He made his way into the entrance of 23 Wall Street, picking his way through the crowd of men wearing rumpled clothes from sleeping in hotel lobbies or on park benches the night before, not a few still drunk from making the rounds at the city's main speakeasies. Safe inside the second door, Lamont heard the thrum of a thousand conversations, people trading rumors.
And it's even in memoirs about atomic toilets*:
The restrooms at Bishop's had the world's only atomic toilets—at least the only ones I have ever encountered. When you flushed, the seat automatically lifted and retreated into a seat-shaped recess in the wall, where it was bathed in a purple light that thrummed in a warm, hygienic, scientifically advanced fashion, then gently came down again impeccably sanitized, nicely warmed, and practically pulsing with atomic thermoluminescence.
Thrum's two main meanings are:
- To sound with a monotonous hum
- To play or pluck a stringed instrument idly: strum
The sense of the word as playing an instrument is illustrated in Mick Herron's Spook Street, where neurotic MI5 agent J.K. Coe plays the air piano on a bus:
Coe wasn't sure when this had begun. It hadn't been a conscious decision to mime his way through a series of improvised piano recitals... he noticed that the young woman next to him was edging away, casting worried glances at him, at his fingers, which were thrumming a non-existent keyboard.
And you only need to advance 10 more pages to find an example of the other sense of the word, when agent Louisa Guy sits at her window:
Sometimes at night she'd sit with the curtains open, a glass of wine in her hand, looking down on trees waving in the wind... glad she was there and no longer in her poky studio with its constant cooking odours, and heavy bass noises thrumming from passing cars.
The earliest known uses of "thrum" as a verb are from the late 1500s. It's an imitative or onomatopoeic word and is a variation of "hum" and "strum". Those other words are more popular in print.
I've heard people say "hum" a million times. I've heard people say "strum" plenty as well. I've heard "buzz", "drone", "vibrate", "pulsate", and "resonate". But I've never once heard anyone say "thrum".
Sure, written language is always going to have more ten-dollar words than spoken language. I've never heard anyone say "crepuscular" or "languorously" in real life either. But "thrum" is short and simple. It's in just about every other book I read. It could easily catch on. But it doesn't.
"Thrum" is a weighty, descriptive word reserved for storytellers. A sometimes soft, sometimes loud, sound in books, not aloud.
