Choosing the right partner for your life journey can help you to achieve great things and to realise your full potential. Unfortunately choosing the wrong partner can drag you down and stop you achieving your promise. Unfortunately the pairing of dulcet and tones has not been a beneficial choice for the lovely dulcet. Every time you hear or read dulcet you expect it to be followed by its inevitable, plodding partner, tones. It has reduced dulcet to nothing more than a tired, old cliché.

Dulcet has been closely associated with tones for more than 200 years. The Oxford English Dictionary list several examples of “dulcet tones” from about the beginning of the 19^th century, including from one of the novels of Benjamin Disraeli, a British Prime Minister.

Introducing speakers with reference to their dulcet tones is such an over-used irony that you cringe. When you hear it you prepare yourself for a barrage of clichés and expect a naïve and unsophisticated speaker.

But dulcet does not deserve this. It is a beautiful word that identifies things as harmonious, melodious and pleasing to the ear. She is descended directly from the Latin word dulcis via the Old French, doucet.

In musical contexts we use the Italian word, dolce, to mean sweet and gentle. The Italian word chose its mate much more wisely than did its English cousin. We drop la dolce vita, the sweet life, into our conversations as we sip our cappuccinos in Leichhardt. When we do so we are using a bit of cosmopolitan language and referencing the classic 1960 Fellini film, La Dolce Vita. It makes us feel suave, urbane and even a little bit sexy. But using dulcet tones just makes us feel a bit daggy and won’t work to impress our friends.

So what can we do with dulcet? We need to wean it away from its partnership with tones. We need to introduce dulcet to new partners, hoping that when it gets out there it can build new relationships and grow into the word that dolce has become. Good luck, sweet dulcet!