The entry for 3 December in Another Almanac of Words at Play is a quasi-story called "What They Did," by Freddy Bosco, consisting of selected book titles beginning with "They." That piece was in the back of my mind one day when I heard Arthur reading aloud a series of movie titles from a movies-on-video […]
Tamara Munzner mentions a sung vocal warmup done in rehearsals for musicals. The lyrics go: Many mumbling mice Were making midnight music in the moonlight Mighty nice (I'm leaving out the tune for now, but repetitions of the verse start a half-step higher each time through.) Now that I think about it, I believe the […]
Words can be tricky things to say. They get tangled around and come out all wrong if you're not careful, and sometimes even if you are. Which is why actors and others who perform using their voices do enunciation exercises to warm up their vocal apparatus. The most famous such exercise is probably the rhyme […]
Dominus, who can usually be counted upon to provide a comment, wrote: Higgledy-Piggledy isn't his favorite— too many syllables, not enough length. Mark-Jason Dominus can't do them anyway; metric analysis isn't his strength. —Mark-Jason Dominus Ranjit Bhatnagar wrote to say: "I once tried to combine the venerable Higgledy-Piggledy form with the equally well-respected Ten-Word Story, […]
I've long had a fondness for certain poetic forms oft-derided as doggerel. One of my favorite such forms is the Double Dactyl, also known as the Higgledy Piggledy. A dactyl is a poetic foot which consists of a stressed syllable followed by two unstressed syllables. Words like "turpitude," "menopause," and "aspirin" are dactylic—their stress pattern […]
The stormy petrel has proved even more elusive than I originally thought. Many of the reader comments have been roughly of the form "You bozo, [x] isn't a stormy petrel!" for some x. (Only more polite, of course.) Some such comments were right on the mark; others I'm more wary of. More on that in […]
A stormy petrel, also known as a storm petrel, is an Atlantic seabird (also found in the Mediterranean). The term "stormy petrel" in general usage has come to refer to a harbinger of trouble; perhaps people believed that the bird was seen just before a storm. Sometime in the late '80s, Elliott Moreton came up […]
Elliott Moreton wrote: I've heard the "no subject" story as a Gladstone-Disraeli joke (so it was a Jewish prime minister, so sue me), where G. says he's heard that D. is so clever he can make a joke on any subject, and then dares him to make one on Victoria—a personal friend of Disraeli's. "Sir, […]
My father used to tell me that between them, he and his father knew everything. "All right," I finally challenged him, "what's the meaning of life?" He replied, "That's one of the things my father knows." While driving somewhere with his parents, my father once boasted that he could tell a joke on any subject […]
Kendra Eshleman mentioned some nifty ladyplant names I'd never seen before: lady's smock, lady's thumb, and lady's ear drop. She added: I learned an interesting facty today from my Pro Scientia calendar: the Greeks knew of a certain plant, the rheon, which (in their experience) mostly grew in foreign countries, so they called it rheon […]