pht.

n.  a possibly involuntary sound capable of arousing a feeling of poignancy about the human predicament.

<When we sit down at the table, [my father] starts to eat and then he looks over and he sees that I’m doing this “thing” which I do quietly [to consecrate the meal].  I’m not coming on about it, I’m just sort of sitting quietly... and he’ll hold his spoon in mid-air and he’ll go “pht.”  It’s almost an involuntary thing that comes out.  It’s like, “O.K., I’ll wait for the kid... it’s his meshuggeneg thing.”  Now that’s not satsang, that is, that is not the community of monks on the path.  And that “pht,” whether that helps me or hinders me... is a function of where I’m at, really.  In other words, if I am into what I’m doing strongly enough, all that that “pht” does is arouse a feeling of poignancy about our predicament, but it doesn’t in any way deter from the amount of the living, vibrant quality I can invest in the thing I’m doing.  —Ram Dass, The Only Dance There Is.>

pht-pht-pht.

n.  the sound of a series of things hatching forth.

<All up the coast I could see the signs of what the Combine had accomplished since I was last through the country, things like, for example—a train stropping at a station and laying a string of full-grown men in mirrored suits and machined hats, laying them like a hatch of identical insects, half-life things coming pht-pht-pht out of the last car, then hooting its electric whistle and moving on down the spoiled land to deposit another hatch.  —Ken Kesey, One Flew Over the Cuckoo’s Nest.>

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