Rhyme Scheme

 

Classical Latin obtundere gives us in English a verb meriting broader use than it has heretofore received. To obtund is to blunt or to deaden. There are urban myths so stupid as to obtund one’s senses upon hearing them repeatedly. But squads of internet dullards also circulate verbal myths. These tedious falsehoods about words traipse their tiresome way across the net, tiptoeing onto one’s computer screen clad in deceit’s daily robe, namely, the statement of fact. I’m going to bury one such falsehood today.

What angers me most is the air of utter certainty in which this nonsense is couched. Please note that I address this column to the letterless yahoos who make this stuff up, not to my dear and glorious site-visitors and readers.

Here’s the sentence of piffle I most encounter:

Quoth the anonymous seer of our tongue: “No word in the English language rhymes with orange, month, silver, or purple.”  

Oh really, Dr. Johnson?

Well, you are wrong, O expert with the vocabulary of a beach pebble. You are dead wrong about every word in that sentence claimed to have no rhyme.

Orange rhymes with sporange. British botanists stress the last syllable; Americans stress the first syllable, making it a perfect rhyme for orange. Yes, it is a rare word. Its more common father is sporangium, the little capsule or receptacle that holds spores in certain species of fungi, molds, and ferns.

Also rhyming with orange are related words in botany: hypnosporange, macrosporange, and megasporange.

Let us compose a modest ditty illustrative of this blissful rhyme.

Oh I gave my love an orange, an orange,

And she gave me a toxic megasporange.

So sorry dear, said she, it’s morning you’ll wait till

Because the fern spore is likely to be fatal.

 

Okay, so I’m not Robert Frost. But let us continue.

No rhyme in English for the word purple, eh? Thank you, O compendium of all lexical knowledge!

Let’s see now. Just off the top of my admittedly semi-literate head, I can rhyme purple with curple, hirple and turple. You want rare rhymes? Add my personal favorite the verb to besperple! Yep, all real words, my little hebetudinous nincompoops.

A curple is a Scottish dialect word for a crupper or a croup, the part of the leather saddle restraint that goes under a horse’s tail. It helps prevent the saddle from slipping forward. I hate to add this old barnyard joke, but, after all, I am shameless. After one has defined croup in a stable, one always adds, “But any horse’s ass would know that.”

To hirple is to walk with a limp or in any halting manner. The verb is still in use in northern England and in Scotland.

To turple was said of animals. It meant to fall down and die, probably a dialectical variant of topple.

To besperple is cited only once in the Oxford English Dictionary, in a sixteenth-century tale of King Arthur and his knights where the author wrote “ The grounde…was all besperpled wyth blode.” In other words there was loser-knight blood splattered all over the English daisies.

No rhyme for silver in English?

Our gratitude for your word wisdom, O bard of Avon Calling, is inexpressible.

Silver rhymes with dicky dilver and chilver. Dicky dilver is a local British nickname for the periwinkle flower. A chilver is a female lamb, also called ewe-lamb or chilver-lamb.

 

No rhyme for month in English?

“Your ignorance, as the great Milton has said, almost subdues my patience.” In contemplation of the superscribed boobish bloopers, I was forced to quote Henry Fielding from his mighty romp of a novel The History of Tom Jones, A Foundling.

Month rhymes with hunth, an official, in-the-dictionary abbreviation, spoken and written, for a hundred thousand. Let us use it in an exemplary sentence: A hunth of morons braying that something is true, when I know it is not, shall never keep me silent.

Month also rhymes with uneath, pronounced ‘unth.’ Uneath is archaic English and now rare, but there it is in the work of the great English poet Edmund Spenser “who he was, uneath was to descry.” Uneath means difficult, not easy.  

Frequent visitors to my digital abode know well my humility, know well how I hate to be a snob, but sometimes the fetid and malodorous leavings must be swept from the head table. The persons who make up these shabby word claims and plaster them on the internet are ragtag riffraff who slouch oblivious in bars, pissed out of their gourds and still sucking suds. Their research for statements like the one we began with today consists of running the alphabet in front of the tail end of the word. So, seeking a rhyme for silver, they will gurgle drunkenly to their sodden tablemates, “Bilver, cilver, dilver, filver, gilver, hilver etc.”

They would never stoop to open a dictionary. That would ‘reek of the lamp,’ as Victorian twits used to say about any statement that smacked of actual learning by the light of a study’s lamp or any display of knowledge that hinted the speaker may have applied the discipline of memorization to some facts.

The problem for these quarter-wits is they have never read anything; they don’t know anything; they have not the slightest intention of ever knowing anything. Nevertheless they wish to pontificate. But even pontiffs must earn their brocade dresses and swishy raiment. These puffed-up buffoons display what my father, Alfred Casselman, used to term “belligerent ignorance.” They know nothing and they are damn proud of knowing nothing. And don’t you dare try to teach them anything! Oscar Wilde limned their plight in his excellent apophthegm: “Ignorance is like a delicate, exotic fruit. Touch it and the bloom is gone.”

Clueless amateurs, even should they hit on a word of modest rarity that fits their rhyming needs, they will be too ignorant to recognize it. For they know nothing of the million-word bounty of English, the language that has the largest number of vocabulary items of any tongue ever spoken on earth.

Ah, weary me! Here there is rhyme but no reason.

Now you are armed to treat the next “amazing fact” that rudely pokes its snout into your computer screen. Any rule about language couched in obdurate certainty is—certainly—worthy of suspicion.