Striking a Chord

I’ve noticed that over time it’s become less common to use the term ‘vocal cords’ and much more common to use ‘vocal folds’ instead. This seems fair, since I used to envision the apparatus as an array (or perhaps a bundle?) of thin ropes when it was ‘vocal cords’ and now I think of them as… well, something else. They’re nearly impossible to describe, and even when you look at several pictures of them they are difficult to comprehend at first. But ‘folds’ doesn’t immediately come to mind and they certainly don’t look like cords. I guess when I hear the word ‘fold’, I think of laundry and something that’s actually folded over, not just flaps of material. In any case, I think they kinda look like lips. (I don’t think there will ever be a movement to use the term ‘vocal lips’, but the description makes more sense to me, despite the somewhat awkward imagery and potential for confusion. Nonetheless…)

I also used to think that the misconception was simply caused by homophones: ‘cords’ and ‘chords’ sound exactly the same. A cord can be considered, among other things, to be a rope except not quite as stout. The vocal folds are like lips (to me), and so they are decidedly not like ropes (to me). However, a chord in the field of geometry is a straight line that joins any two points on a circle, the diameter being a very special case. If you consider the lips on the inside of your throat (yup, still a little weird) that can open and close, you might come to appreciate that each of the vocal folds is attached to the side of the throat, forming a chord instead of a cord.

Never mind that no one writes ‘vocal chords’, and never mind that ‘chord’ comes from the Latin chorda (rope) which brings us neatly back around to the wrong idea about what vocal cords actually look like.