Category: Miscellany

T’s friend Lissa took Voice & Diction at a Colorado College in the early nineties, and remembers having to recite bits of this poem as part of an oral exam. Read it aloud – and it seems reasonably easy at first. And then you remember: (Edited to add: – this is according to Lissa’s long-ago professor -), the English pronounce Pall Mall “pell mell,” for some reason, and viscount has a long I sound… and it all gets worse from there. Shudder:

😯

The Chaos

Dearest creature in creation
Studying English pronunciation,
   I will teach you in my verse
   Sounds like corpse, corps, horse and worse.

I will keep you, Susy, busy,
Make your head with heat grow dizzy;
   Tear in eye, your dress you’ll tear;

   Queer, fair seer, hear my prayer.

Pray, console your loving poet,
Make my coat look new, dear, sew it!

   Just compare heart, hear and heard,
   Dies and diet, lord and word.

Sword and sward, retain and Britain
(Mind the latter how it’s written).
   Made has not the sound of bade,

   Say–said, pay–paid, laid but plaid.

Now I surely will not plague you

With such words as vague and ague,
   But be careful how you speak,
   Say: gush, bush, steak, streak, break, bleak ,

Previous, precious, fuchsia, via

Recipe, pipe, studding-sail, choir;
   Woven, oven, how and low,
   Script, receipt, shoe, poem, toe.

Say, expecting fraud and trickery:
Daughter, laughter and Terpsichore,
   Branch, ranch, measles, topsails, aisles,

   Missiles, similes, reviles.

Wholly, holly, signal, signing,
Same, examining, but mining,

   Scholar, vicar, and cigar,
   Solar, mica, war and far.

From “desire”: desirable–admirable from “admire”,
Lumber, plumber, bier, but brier,
   Topsham, brougham, renown, but known,

   Knowledge, done, lone, gone, none, tone,

One, anemone, Balmoral,

Kitchen, lichen, laundry, laurel.
   Gertrude, German, wind and wind,

   Beau, kind, kindred, queue, mankind,

Tortoise, turquoise, chamois-leather,
Reading, Reading, heathen, heather.

   This phonetic labyrinth
   Gives moss, gross, brook, brooch, ninth, plinth.

Have you ever yet endeavoured

To pronounce revered and severed,
   Demon, lemon, ghoul, foul, soul,
   Peter, petrol and patrol?

Billet does not end like ballet;

Bouquet, wallet, mallet, chalet.
   Blood and flood are not like food,

   Nor is mould like should and would.

Banquet is not nearly parquet,
Which exactly rhymes with khaki.

   Discount, viscount, load and broad,
   Toward, to forward, to reward,

Ricocheted and crocheting, croquet?
Right! Your pronunciation’s OK.
   Rounded, wounded, grieve and sieve,

   Friend and fiend, alive and live.

Is your r correct in higher?
Keats asserts it rhymes Thalia.

   Hugh, but hug, and hood, but hoot,
   Buoyant, minute, but minute.

Say abscission with precision,

Now: position and transition;
   Would it tally with my rhyme
   If I mentioned paradigm?

Twopence, threepence, tease are easy,

But cease, crease, grease and greasy?
   Cornice, nice, valise, revise,
   Rabies, but lullabies.

Of such puzzling words as nauseous,

Rhyming well with cautious, tortious,
   You’ll envelop lists, I hope,
   In a linen envelope.

Would you like some more? You’ll have it!

Affidavit, David, davit.
   To abjure, to perjure. Sheik
   Does not sound like Czech but ache.

Liberty, library, heave and heaven,
Rachel, loch, moustache, eleven.

   We say hallowed, but allowed,
   People, leopard, towed but vowed.

Mark the difference, moreover,

Between mover, plover, Dover.
   Leeches, breeches, wise, precise,

   Chalice, but police and lice,

Camel, constable, unstable,
Principle, disciple, label.

   Petal, penal, and canal,
   Wait, surmise, plait, promise, pal,

Suit, suite, ruin. Circuit, conduit
Rhyme with “shirk it” and “beyond it”,
   But it is not hard to tell
   Why it’s pall, mall, but Pall Mall.

Muscle, muscular, gaol, iron,
Timber, climber, bullion, lion,

   Worm and storm, chaise, chaos, chair,
   Senator, spectator, mayor,

Ivy, privy, famous; clamour
Has the a of drachm and hammer.
   Pussy, hussy and possess,

   Desert, but desert, address.

Golf, wolf, countenance, lieutenants
Hoist in lieu of flags left pennants.

   Courier, courtier, tomb, bomb, comb,
   Cow, but Cowper, some and home.

“Solder, soldier! Blood is thicker“,
Quoth he, “than liqueur or liquor“,
   Making, it is sad but true,

   In bravado, much ado.

Stranger does not rhyme with anger,
Neither does devour with clangour.

   Pilot, pivot, gaunt, but aunt,
   Font, front, wont, want, grand and grant.

Arsenic, specific, scenic,
Relic, rhetoric, hygienic.
   Gooseberry, goose, and close, but close,
   Paradise, rise, rose, and dose.

Say inveigh, neigh, but inveigle,
Make the latter rhyme with eagle.
   Mind! Meandering but mean,

   Valentine and magazine.

And I bet you, dear, a penny,
You say mani-(fold) like many,
   Which is wrong. Say rapier, pier,

   Tier (one who ties), but tier.

Arch, archangel; pray, does erring
Rhyme with herring or with stirring?

   Prison, bison, treasure trove,
   Treason, hover, cover, cove,

Perseverance, severance. Ribald
Rhymes (but piebald doesn’t) with nibbled.
   Phaeton, paean, gnat, ghat, gnaw,

   Lien, psychic, shone, bone, pshaw.

Don’t be down, my own, but rough it,
And distinguish buffet, buffet;

   Brood, stood, roof, rook, school, wool, boon,
   Worcester, Boleyn, to impugn.

Say in sounds correct and sterling
Hearse, hear, hearken, year and yearling.
   Evil, devil, mezzotint,

   Mind the z! (A gentle hint.)

Now you need not pay attention
To such sounds as I don’t mention,
   Sounds like pores, pause, pours and paws,
   Rhyming with the pronoun yours;

Nor are proper names included,

Though I often heard, as you did,
   Funny rhymes to unicorn,
   Yes, you know them, Vaughan and Strachan.

No, my maiden, coy and comely,

I don’t want to speak of Cholmondeley.
   No. Yet Froude compared with proud
   Is no better than McLeod.

But mind trivial and vial,

Tripod, menial, denial,
   Troll and trolley, realm and ream,
   Schedule, mischief, schism, and scheme.

Argil, gill, Argyll, gill. Surely
May be made to rhyme with Raleigh,
   But you’re not supposed to say
   Piquet rhymes with sobriquet.

Had this invalid invalid

Worthless documents? How pallid,
   How uncouth he, couchant, looked,
   When for Portsmouth I had booked!

Zeus, Thebes, Thales, Aphrodite,

Paramour, enamoured, flighty,
   Episodes, antipodes,
   Acquiesce, and obsequies.

Please don’t monkey with the geyser,
Don’t peel ‘taters with my razor,

   Rather say in accents pure:
   Nature, stature and mature.

Pious, impious, limb, climb, glumly,
Worsted, worsted, crumbly, dumbly,
   Conquer, conquest, vase, phase, fan,
   Wan, sedan and artisan.

The th will surely trouble you
More than r, ch or w.
   Say then these phonetic gems:

   Thomas, thyme, Theresa, Thames.

Thompson, Chatham, Waltham, Streatham,
There are more but I forget ’em–
   Wait! I’ve got it: Anthony,
   Lighten your anxiety.

The archaic word albeit

Does not rhyme with eight-you see it;
   With and forthwith, one has voice,
   One has not, you make your choice.

Shoes, goes, does *. Now first say: finger;

Then say: singer, ginger, linger.
   Real, zeal, mauve, gauze and gauge,
   Marriage, foliage, mirage, age,

Hero, heron, query, very,
Parry, tarry fury, bury,
   Dost, lost, post, and doth, cloth, loth,

   Job, Job, blossom, bosom, oath.

Faugh, oppugnant, keen oppugners,
Bowing, bowing, banjo-tuners

   Holm you know, but noes, canoes,
   Puisne, truism, use, to use?

Though the difference seems little,

We say actual, but victual,
   Seat, sweat, chaste, caste, Leigh, eight, height,

   Put, nut, granite, and unite.

Reefer does not rhyme with deafer,
Feoffer does, and zephyr, heifer.

   Dull, bull, Geoffrey, George, ate, late,
   Hint, pint, senate, but sedate.

Gaelic, Arabic, pacific,
Science, conscience, scientific;
   Tour, but our, dour, succour, four,

   Gas, alas, and Arkansas.

Say manoeuvre, yacht and vomit,
Next omit, which differs from it

   Bona fide, alibi
   Gyrate, dowry and awry.

Sea, idea, guinea, area,

Psalm, Maria, but malaria.
   Youth, south, southern, cleanse and clean,

   Doctrine, turpentine, marine.

Compare alien with Italian,
Dandelion with battalion,

   Rally with ally; yea, ye,
   Eye, I, ay, aye, whey, key, quay!

Say aver, but ever, fever,
Neither, leisure, skein, receiver.

   Never guess-it is not safe,
   We say calves, valves, half, but Ralf.

Starry, granary, canary,

Crevice, but device, and eyrie,
   Face, but preface, then grimace,
   Phlegm, phlegmatic, ass, glass, bass.

Bass, large, target, gin, give, verging,
Ought, oust, joust, and scour, but scourging;

   Ear, but earn; and ere and tear
   Do not rhyme with here but heir.

Mind the o of off and often

Which may be pronounced as orphan,
   With the sound of saw and sauce;
   Also soft, lost, cloth and cross.

Pudding, puddle, putting. Putting?
Yes: at golf it rhymes with shutting.
   Respite, spite, consent, resent.
   Liable, but Parliament.

Seven is right, but so is even,

Hyphen, roughen, nephew, Stephen,
   Monkey, donkey, clerk and jerk,

   Asp, grasp, wasp, demesne, cork, work.

A of valour, vapid vapour,

S of news (compare newspaper),
   G of gibbet, gibbon, gist,
   I of antichrist and grist,

Differ like diverse and divers,
Rivers, strivers, shivers, fivers.
   Once, but nonce, toll, doll, but roll,

   Polish, Polish, poll and poll.

Pronunciation-think of Psyche!-
Is a paling, stout and spiky.
   Won’t it make you lose your wits
   Writing groats and saying “grits”?

It’s a dark abyss or tunnel
Strewn with stones like rowlock, gunwale,
   Islington, and Isle of Wight,

   Housewife, verdict and indict.

Don’t you think so, reader, rather,
Saying lather, bather, father?

   Finally, which rhymes with enough,
   Though, through, bough, cough, hough, sough, tough??

Hiccough has the sound of sup…
My advice is: GIVE IT UP!
– G. Nolst Trenité

Please ignore the extra ‘u’ here and there – it’s an English poem (as in, the nation), and was written by a Dutchman, Gerard Nolst Trenité (1870-1946), who also wrote under the pseudonym Charivarius. It first appeared in an appendix to the author’s 1920 textbook Drop Your Foreign Accent: engelsche uitspraakoefeningen.

One must ask: in what world does parquet rhyme with khaki???

This does not help us with Scots English at all.

Today D. realized that there are all manner of rhyming words for kook. House rhymes – say who-sss and you have it. Book also rhymes – say “boo” and put a “k” on the end. The best, though, is that cook sounds exactly like kook. Awesome. A “kook” is somebody who cooks food. Yeah. Right.

Every now and again we’re glad that we speak American English rather than Scots English. How else would you know whether someone was talking about a “nutter” or somebody working in a restaurant?

Of course, we have been told that “dune” should not be sung as “doon” (the way the Scots say the word “down”) but should be pronounced “dee-yoon” instead. Yeah. Sure. OK, then. We’ll sing it that way. In our own “who-sss” we’ll keep on saying “doon” instead.

-D & T

…let me take you down, ’cause I’m going to… Strawberry Fields… Just add a tiny bit of water, and a long, slow cooking time. Later, as little sugar as we can get away with, and this time we also added fragrant lime zest and juice, to preserve the color, as much as possible, and add a little bite in what can sometimes be just a bit too sweet. Both the strawberry sauce and the rich, dark preserves, sweetened with brown sugar, turned out beautifully.

Never at any other point in our lives are we judged as harshly or scrutinized as thoroughly as we are when we are in school. We met a guidance counselor for the university, who, finding that D. is a PhD candidate, remarked, “After completing a PhD, many students are relieved at the idea of 9-5 employment.” Indeed.

If you suddenly had the burden of the last 65,000 words or so lifted from your brain, you, too, might find yourself buoyed, and bewildered by the incredible lightness of your being (five points if you can identify the author within two seconds) (Sorry. Reflex. Was remembering school…). D. has often said that he’s a fairly simple person. “Either I’m happy, or I’m stressed.”

It’s so nice to see “happy” again.

(“Nice” is such an unbelievable understatement.)

So much to do these days suddenly emptied days – weddings to attend, fruit to find, flowers to photograph, random women to anoint with thick henna paste… Okay, wait. That last one we don’t advise just anyone try with any random woman. First, pick someone wearing shorts nearby, whom you can be certain won’t clock you one upside the head. Next, one must beguile said woman, and approach them whilst they are reading, and utterly ignoring everything but their book. Then, the ensuing grunt of assent means that as long as you can get them to hold their book or pick-and-tap on the computer one-handed, one can do whatever one pleases with the other hand. Or, leg, as the case may be…

The librarians smile when we come in with our huge bag. We, who were weekend regulars for two years suddenly vanished for the last two. They may have wondered at our reappearance, thinking us gone back to our country, but no. We only just now have realized how circumscribed our lives had become, under the burden of student budgeting, stress, work, and more stress. Reading absolute nonsense from the new fiction section makes a weekend afternoon feel like a holiday.

And so the summer – thunderstorms and rain showers notwithstanding – finds us savoring various projects. How are you?

Awhile back we had a problem with spambots registering new accounts (hundreds of registrations a day), so we disabled new user registration for awhile. Registration is now opened up again. Apologies to those who wished to register (and comment) and were unable to do so.

This site requires that you create an account if you wish to comment. Your first comment will be moderated, as will any comments including more than 2 hyperlinks. This, also, is to cut down on the spammers. After you’ve proven yourself to be a human being, and one who is actually interested in this site as this site (rather than as a place to hawk your bogus pharmaceutical deals), you’ll be able to comment and have the comments come through immediately.

-D & T

For those of you who happily listen to your music in “shuffle” mode, this post should mean very little. For those who listen through the albums in the order in which they came on the CD, and who have organized their playlists in a particular order of albums, this post may not mean anything unless you use music as I do. Yes. Music, for me, has a very distinct use: blocking out the external world so that I can focus.

Don’t get me wrong: I love music, and happily listen to the radio (although I do object when, say, we transition from Sibelius’ Finlandia to the theme song from The Big Valley, which happened just Wednesday afternoon). But when I’m at work, I need something which is consistent, and which I’ve listened to so many times that the next song isn’t any surprise. The music all needs to be of a fairly high energy – to get the fingers flying over the keyboard – and the albums must come in the same order, which my player kindly does by default. The order in which I place the albums is the order in which they’re played, and I typically array the music out from happy pop music (Lenka, the Cranberries), through darker pop music (10,000 Maniacs, Tori Amos, Sinead O’Connor), and then conclude with the hard stuff (Metallica and Paris, Sonic Jihad). Lenka just recently supplanted The Cranberries as the lead album, as she’s a new addition to our music collection.

I don’t always start at the beginning, and I usually don’t make it all the way through because I’ll have had a particular mood which suited me for that day’s work. Yesterday, however, I began with Metallica, carried through Paris … and got the shock of my life when everything rolled over to Lenka. It was truly, truly horrible. I actually had to pull out the headphones and tell T. about it, it was so startling, and then roll back the playlist to Pearl Jam (comes before Metallica). After a few times through Pearl Jam, I could work my way back, and reconsider Lenka, but it was tough.

Music gets into your brain, folks. Very far into your brain.

-D

Springtime in a bowl, folks; a good Thai soup burnishes the stomach with warmth and makes you not mind the wind and the intermittent rain and hail. Plus, it’s stuffed chock full of veg. We started this soup with a pair of Thai bird chillies, a thick slice of galangal root (or you can use ginger), a half stalk of lemon grass and a handful of bruised makrut lime leaves (they’re sold as kaffir lime leaves. Kaffir is a racial slur in South Africa, so we say makrut… {ETYMOLOGICAL DIGRESSION #1} *Oddly kafir in Arabic, which is the words origin language, merely means infidel or unbeliever – which is an insult to a Muslim; no idea how it got so twisted with apartheid and such), and simmered them in three cups of water for about a half hour. We then added a can of coconut milk, a container of firm tofu which had been frozen and thawed (accidentally), roughly chopped onions, a cup of button mushrooms, a random amount of fresh green beans, broccolini, a sliced zucchini (or, if you’re from here, a courgette) and a couple of carrots we had sitting. A quick ten minutes, and we added some pre-cooked udon noodles, two tablespoons of mae ploy, which is a sweet pepper sauce, a tablespoon of soy sauce, and a dash of lemon juice. It. Was. Amazing. You’ll note that the veg was barely cooked, and the aromatics were left in — that’s always tricky. Note: don’t eat the lemon grass. It’s just not that tasty. If you’re concerned about your veg being too raw with such a short cooking time, you can always give a three minute blanch to everything except for the zucchini/courgette.

For good or for ill, this tom kha taohu soup was the last really amazing, fresh-tasting, veglicious dish we made ’round these parts, and that was about, oh, two weeks ago. Since then, the Work Fairy has come and smacked us in the head with her pointy little wand. D’s dissertation deadline is looming, his work project deadline loomed, and T’s got an editorial letter at last and another manuscript revision ahead of her — plus her end-of-April freelance revision. Erg.

Our house looks like the scene of a crime. The piles of laundry – nicely separated, not yet put into the microscopic machine – have become ambulatory and are congregating in corners, plotting. The bathroom is routinely disinfected and the dishes get done — simply because we have a limited amount of them, and T. has Issues With Germs — but the vacuuming isn’t done and the dust is collecting in drifts, which is sort of hard to avoid this time of year. The occasional sunshine has at last provoked the trees into bloom — and the grass, trees, flowers and nasty Scotch broom manages to send commando pollen dust into any little crack or crevice on the wind, which blows and blows and blows. Allergies go hand-in-hand with the Spring, alas. But, we aren’t complaining. (We don’t have time).

Along with our regularly scheduled work, we’ve had extra rehearsal for our Spring concert, which is going to be awesome, by the way. It’s a Vaughn Williams/William Walton retrospective, which will be delightful for our English audience members, and a bit stressful for the rest of us, but things are coming together and we’re finally getting to where we can look forward to the orchestra bits of the piece. Aside from our single choir, which has been split into two parts singing away at different bits, the score calls for two flutes, a piccolo, two oboes, something called a cor anglais or a sax, three clarinets in B-flat an alto saxophone in E-flat, 2 bassoons, and a contrabassoon. We’ll have four horns in F: three trumpets, two tenor trombones, a bass trombone, a tuba; timpani, and three or four percussionists playing a side drum, a tenor drum, a triangle, a tambourine, castanets, a silvery shimmer of cymbals, a bass drum, a huge solemn-sounding gong, which is going to sound like the tolling of a bell, a xylophone, a glockenspiel, a wood block, slapsticks, and an anvil. (YES. An. ANVIL. As in, blacksmiths.) Finally, there will be two harps, a piano, an organ, and a full complement of strings.

We’re beginning to wonder how we’ll all fit on the stage.

Despite our amusing tone, we are both kind of out of our minds with stress, and it is beginning to show. We ask you to think of us from time to time, as we stagger through. Please keep in touch.

Gung Hay Fat Choi! Never has the Lunar New Year seemed like such a good idea. 2011 hasn’t seemed to have much to recommend it thus far, what with the ice, cold, and illness it has had to offer, so we’re gratefully looking to the Year of the Rabbit to begin. Can’t believe it’s February already — ! In the dissertation countdown, D. now has five months until his oral exams, and his first deadline to turn in a completed first draft.

The next few months promise to be better. The program for our March concert has been set — and it’s definitely a long one, timed down to the second to take advantage of the orchestra until the final moment. (The Musicians Union is pretty fierce.) We’ll be singing a few of the aforementioned “choral classics,” including, for our choral aficionados, the Parry, I Was Glad, Faure’s Cantique de Jean Racine, a really gorgeous arrangement of Elgar’s Lux Aeterna from Nimrod, and the Easter hymn from Cavalleria Rusticana — PLUS the Rossini Vespers! Yes, there will be the usual twelve minute or so intermission, and boy are we glad.

Also, in March, we’ve got company coming — our last of the year, unless the Georgia friends come in June — we may have T’s “little” though-taller-than-she-is-and-has-been-since-he-was-thirteen brother and niece coming to visit, if all the passport issues go well. Looks like they’ll be our last guests, though; after March, the Purge and Pack will continue in earnest. So far, T’s rid the house of three suitcases full of books, and next week will weed out all of the extra clothes that won’t be needed. After that, small appliances and furniture will be sold and given away — because we want to travel as lightly as we can. We still have no idea where we’re going, but especially after D’s last bout of illness, T. is beginning to feel like the East Coast city slickers in the 1800’s who were told to move West to help out their consumptive relatives. Much as we love mist and fog, there’s something unhealthful about it in a big city, and we’ll have to find someplace either cleaner or drier — or both. D. has been sick here every winter, at least twice, and was sick for the entire month of January. He’s finally — gratefully — on the mend… and job-hunting.

Right now, we’re trying to be open to possibilities, but T. would very much like to live where she can have a few herbs growing in a sunny patch — even a sunny patch of concrete with little pots. D. tends to be looking toward where the best money could be made, as he’s looking ahead to those student loan bills, but he’s planning to do some sort of teaching or mentoring wherever we end up, even if it’s volunteering somewhere. One of the best things we’ve learned from being here is more of what our personal strengths are. Living abroad, you learn to do without familiar things, but you also learn what you cannot do without. Despite the pipes and the mold on the window casings, with which T. battles on what seems an hourly basis, it’s been a good experience.

…and it will be an even better one when all the loose ends are tied up, and we’re on the road to somewhere else.

Meanwhile, we’re scuffing our feet in our metaphorical bunny slippers, and vowing to take what comes with curiosity and equanimity. Just like a rabbit.