Word-geek note. A little while back, I bought a second hand DVD of The Revenge of the Sith, which I had seen once when it came out, given it a 75%, and not really felt the need to see again in the theatre. My tastes run to films with a theatrical rather than a spectacular approach, that use the full power of the spoken language and on the full range of human expression, gesture and motion. In Lucas’ work, much of the emotional text is conveyed in the visuals and the music, and the spoken word tends to be used for exposition, or for the exchange of certain phrase-motifs.

Nevertheless, there’s one rather satisfying line in there, made so by the use of one word over its alternative. As Palpatine declares himself emperor, to the roaring approval of the senate, Padmé gets to make about her only political statement of the film (her political persona having landed on the cutting room floor): So this is the way that liberty dies. With thund’rous applause.

It’s the word liberty. The stresses in that sentence fall where they should, on this, way, lib, and dies, and the vowels in liberty match the vowels in those important words. The alternative choice is freedom, equivalent at the level of popular understanding. But it would not work: the two syllable freedom breaks the rhythm, and the long e jars in a sentence full of neutral vowels; the sentence, which should be driving towards ‘dies’, stalls in the middle.