Archive for Rhyme
I have a note file in which I keep examples that I run across of particularly clever or funny rhymes. The book I’m currently reading from my unread-books shelf is Ogden Nash’s 1938 I’m a Stranger Here Myself, and I thought for a moment that I was going to copy some rhymes from it into […]
Yesterday, a friend pointed me to a brilliant three-page linguistics paper, published in 1994: “The perception of rhythm in language,” by psycholinguist Dr. Anne Cutler. Here’s the beginning of part 1 of the text: The orthography of English has a very simple basis for establishing where words in written texts begin and end: both before […]
Is there a name for a kind of quasi-rhyme where a sound or syllable is repeated, but not in as organized a way as it is in rhyme? As you may know, two words rhyme if all the sounds from the final accented vowel to the end of the word are the same. (For details, […]
“The Carnegie Mellon University Pronouncing Dictionary is an open-source machine-readable pronunciation dictionary for North American English that contains over 134,000 words and their pronunciations.” One could use this data for speech recognition and speech synthesis, as the page suggests. One could also, presumably, use it to automatically create a rhyming dictionary, which is not a […]
Hi, I’m S. You may vaguely remember me from such comments as “I think it’s good to be aware of the peculiar rules of the Pretentious Pedant dialect of English” and Eleanor Heffalump’s double-dactyl, which were written under the name of “Shmuel” before I came out as nonbinary and changed my handle. (It turns out […]
Leon Rosselson's song “Flying High, Flying Free” came on, and I don’t know the song, so at the end of these lines: Butterfly, dragonfly, salmon and seal, whale and reindeer, cuckoo and eel, each of them doing the migration dance I just naturally assumed that the next line would be: and I’d do it too […]
(Content warning for referring to, and writing out in full, a specific racial slur.) Back in column ggg, I attempted to piece together the famous poem about English pronunciation “The Chaos,” based on a bunch of fragmentary online sources. And then in 2013, I came across the website of the English Spelling Society, which provided […]
I just read a bit of verse in a book that reminded me, because of its rhythm, of Tolkien. It looked like a quotation, so I Googled it, and discovered...
Watched Once Upon a Mattress last night. There were several good rhymes and other good lines in the songs; I especially liked this one: My time is at a premium...