Hanaba Munn Welch — Chirp-clunk to “Harrumph!”

If your car is making a funny noise, maybe chirping, the best way to make it stop is to take it to your mechanic. Works every time.
The farther you have to drive and the less time your mechanic has to listen for the aberrant noise (which, of course, has magically disappeared by the time he lends you and your car his ear), the better it works.
Except, as you know, the noise returns once you’ve distanced yourself considerably from your mechanic or once he’s closed for the day.
Yes, I know failing water pumps chirp, but mine’s OK. Furthermore, it’s sort of a chirp-clunk.
Car noises aren’t easy to enunciate, but they seem to cross language barriers.
My Mississippi friend Molly married a Pole, Mike. As I recall, they were living in Austria when their car began to make an intermittent disturbing muffleresque sound. She couldn’t wait to hear how Mike described it to the Viennese mechanic.
Yes, even in Vienna, elegant city of high-brow composers, musicians and psychoanalysts, they also have mechanics. Central Cemetery has a special section for the likes of Beethoven, Schubert, Brahms and some of the Strausses. It’s fitting. Musicians are among the people you miss the most when they die. The same holds true for mechanics. They just don’t get special sections in cemeteries.
Anyway, Molly thought what Mike said wasn’t much different from what she would have said in Mississippi English. Car noises are a challenge to describe no matter the language — probably because languages were invented before cars.
Yet I suspect some languages are better than others when it comes to mechanical noises, just as other tongues lend themselves better to mimicking bird sounds. When the mechanical noise itself is a chirp, that puts everybody on equal footing.
I was in grade school when I realized English-speaking children were at a disadvantage in war games if machine guns were involved. World War II was not long past. We kids enacted some battles on the school grounds at recess. We girls played with the boys or watched, so I remember it all clearly. The guys who spoke Spanish rolled their R’s to give voice to their imaginary machine guns: RRRRRRRR!!! Their anglophone adversaries could say only “eh-eh-eh-eh-eh!” — hard to transcribe but you know what I mean.
I later taught myself to roll r’s but a bit too late to make machine gun noises — not that the boys would have sent me to the front line anyway. Believe it or not, I learned the rolled “r” by singing Major Hoople’s “harrumph” to the first part of the tune to Popeye’s song. Go ahead. Try it. But sound the “ph” like a soft “p.”
If you don’t remember Major Hoople of “Our Boarding House,” he popularized “harrumph.”
I could end with the interjection “harrumph” but it’s your turn. It’s even transitive.
I’m probably being harrumphed right now by that reader who doesn’t like me. At least I hope so.