Skip, I never knew that he was supposed to have done that to Zsa Zsa. Not a gentlemanly way to suggest to a lady that her earrings were upstaging him, certainly. Extremely bad taste. How little do I know about her, and him! It's not even remotely funny, what you describe.
As to beautiful words, sounds are arbitrary bearers of meaning, but insofar as we judge poems (or any other art), we judge them on equally arbitrary human-based criteria such as sonority, precision, throatyness, onomatopoppaea, roundyness, etc; and I wonder what the speakers of 'click' languages think about the grandeur of French, for example.
I like the word
cembalo. It is very much the same as a Greek
santouri. I like its sound very much (two links:
A, and
B, and
C), and I like to spell it
cymbalum. But most naive readers won't know what to do with the initial letter 'c', and will say 's' or maybe 'k'. If I write it for a random reader, how should I spell it? Help! Help!