This’ll keep you busy for a couple of days
So this Dutch dude wrote a poem called The Chaos, about what an utter pain in the ass English is for the non-native speaker. It’s 270-something lines documenting 800 or so spelling/pronunciation anomalies. (You can learn more about the history of it here).
Aw, c’mon…it’s kind of fun. Dip in anywhere and sample a couple of verses. Works best read aloud. Remember — English spellings and pronunciations.
Great weekend and thanks for all the ghoti!
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 with 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!
February 10, 2012 — 9:55 pm
Comments: 32
Balls, cried the queen!
Bull testicle pie. For Valentine’s. Not kidding. Would I kid? I would not.
Because nothing says romance like cow balls in pastry.
It’s a bit of a send-up, this. Oh, it’s from Charlie Bigham‘s, which is a mainstream food supplier. Offered exclusively through Ocado, which is our best grocery home delivery service. But they’re warning of “very limited availability.”
Read: cheap publicity before Valentine’s.
No, I’m sorry. You’re just going to have to make the Aunty’s Spotted Dick jokes for yourself.
February 8, 2012 — 11:19 pm
Comments: 25
Good old Anglo Saxon nursery rhymes
The only thing the American robin (Turdus migratorius) and the original robin redbreast (Erithacus rubecula) have in common is red feathers. They are otherwise completely different birds. The American robin is a sort of big thrush; the British robin is one of those tiny round puffball bastards, like a chickadee.
The robin was once voted Britain’s favorite bird. He’s a cheeky, aggressive little sod, often pictured perching on the handle of a garden spade. Because, apparently, he’ll fly down and do that if you’ve been turning earth, to check if you’ve dug up any worms.
He’s also one of the few songbirds that overwinters in the UK. Very confusing to an American, all the robins on Christmas cards.
Anyhoo, I just ran across this: the nursery rhyme “Little Robin Red breast” boasts an unusual number of variations. The reason? Trying to get around the original last line:
Little Robin Red breast,
Sitting on a pole,
Nidde, Noddle, Went his head.
And poop went his Hole.
So. There you go.
January 31, 2012 — 10:50 pm
Comments: 19
What to get the woman who has everything
A honkin’ big boat.
I think the Telegraph is conflating two issues here. The government is proposing buying Her Maj a nice new £60M yacht for her Diamond Jubilee, but the picture shows the Royal Barge, which I’m pretty sure either exists already or will definitely exist. They’re pulling together a seven mile flotilla of a thousand boats to float down the Thames as part of the celebrations in June.
Only Victoria managed 60 years on the sparkly chair (that’s British monarchs; I don’t how many swarthy potentates from far-flung principalities might have made the grade). She reigned a further four years after that, so Liz only has to go another five years to be THRONE WINNAH!
We’re getting a four-day weekend (as if my whole life isn’t a weekend) and I’ve learned today we’ll have a party in our parish. There are little grants being handed out to individual parishes for the celebrations. So for the first time in my life, I shall feast and make merry on the coin of some uppity rich bastard in London. Just like a fairy tale.
If I get a move on, I can have my citizenship by then and be a proper English peasant.
January 18, 2012 — 10:53 pm
Comments: 33
The giant chicken, obviously
Boxed: Fabulous Coffins from the UK and Ghana
Free novelty coffin show at the Southbank Centre, London, January 20-29. “A vibrant collection of bespoke coffins from the famous Pa Joe workshop in Ghana and Crazy Coffins in Nottingham.”
Pineapple. Nokia phone. Skateboard (“urban decay”. Nice). Ballet shoe. Corkscrew (“Special Scented Reserve.” Mmm). Shark.
I get the impression the Brits are taking the piss, while the Ghanaians are just really, really hoping the afterlife will be decent enough to front them a Coke.
Give it a miss, shall we?
January 12, 2012 — 10:10 pm
Comments: 16
Okay, now I’m pretty sure somebody is blowing smoke up my butt
When we drive around Britain, I often accuse Uncle B of sending a PR team from Disney on ahead to change all the placenames to painfully quaint things like Chipping Sodbury and Tincleton (I swear some day I’m going to stop and have tea in Pratt’s Bottom). Because sometimes Brits really do make shit up, and they do it with such maddeningly straight faces, it’s damn near impenetrable.
So when one of the neighbors told me he used to go Dwile Flonking at a local pub, I naturally gave him the hairy eyeball. As described, it involves dancing in a ring around a man trying to hit you with a rag soaked in beer dregs.
Turns out, Dwile Flonking has a Wikipedia entry. Huh.
A ‘dull witted person’ is chosen as the referee or ‘jobanowl’ and the two teams decide who flonks first by tossing a sugar beet. The game begins when the jobanowl shouts “Here y’go t’gither!”
The non-flonking team joins hands and dances in a circle around a member of the flonking team, a practice known as ‘girting’. The flonker dips his dwile-tipped ‘driveller’ (a pole 2–3 ft long and made from hazel or yew) into a bucket of beer, then spins around in the opposite direction to the girters and flonks his dwile at them.
If the dwile misses completely it is known as a ‘swadger’ or a ‘swage’. When this happens the flonker must drink the contents of an ale-filled ‘gazunder’ (chamber pot (‘goes-under’ the bed)) before the wet dwile has passed from hand to hand along the line of now non-girting girters chanting the ancient ceremonial mantra of “pot pot pot”.
A full game comprises four ‘snurds’, each snurd being one team taking a turn at girting.
Well, actually, as it turns out, no. Despite a solemn and ancient pedigree, the game was almost certainly made up by two printing apprentices in 1966. But, hey, getting on for fifty years — pretty darned ancient to an American, I guess.
January 11, 2012 — 11:32 pm
Comments: 27
The United Kingdom of Generally Bonkers
British architect Sir Bertram Clough Williams-Ellis loved the Italian Riviera so much that he built his very own entire Italian fishing village. In Wales.
It took him fifty years (1925 – 1975). You’ve probably seen it — it’s been used as a TV and movie set a gazillion times, most memorably as ‘The Village’ in The Prisoner. When old Sir Bertram died, he had hisself cremated and made into a rocket, which burst over Portmeirion twenty years later in a fireworks display.
But that’s not what I want to talk about.
Four years ago, groundskeepers at the (genuine) 12th Century castle at Portemeirion felled a tree to widen a path and left the dead tree there. Within months, persons unknown had hammered it full of coins. Mostly modern two pence pieces. Like, taken a rock and smashed it against a coin until it was deeply embedded in the trunk. Or, rather, thousands of them.
There are now seven trees on the grounds similarly encrusted in copper.
The estate manager swears he didn’t start it, hasn’t advertised it and has no idea who’s doing it. He did some digging around, though, and discovered there’s a British tradition of ‘wishing trees’ — kind of like wishing wells — dating back at least to the 18th Century.
So. Huh.
January 3, 2012 — 10:53 pm
Comments: 39
One of pre-history’s great WTFs
Okay, so the Orknies are those islands on the North coast of Scotland. Bleak, tiny and cold as witch titty. And eight years ago, archeologists discovered a gigantic Neolithic building complex up there. Presumably a temple complex, because the thing is so huge and weird.
How huge? Well the site — smack between two well-known stone circles — is (I believe they said) the size of four football fields end-to-end (presumably they meant soccer fields, which are even bigger than real football fields). They’ve only excavated a tiny part of it, but scans say there are about a hundred buildings total.
And by buildings, I mean dressed stone buildings with slate rooves and weirdly curvy walls fifteen feet thick. Some evidence of carving and painting on the walls, lots of tools and bits of pottery. Whatever they were doing up there in the ass end of nowhere, they were doing it for a thousand years, somehow keeping themselves amply supplied with workmen, man-hours and quarried stone. Peat for the fires and food for the priests.
Oh, and they found a pit full of beef bones. Testing showed the cattle were raised on fodder with a high nitrogen content — in other words, raised by farmers who used sophisticated fertilizer, presumably manure-based. But — get this — these cattle were all slaughtered at the same, or about the same, time.
They had a beef feast for 10,000 and smashed the whole place up, deliberately. Probably not invaders, because another similarly-constructed hall was then built on the ruins.
And this five hundred years before Stonehenge was assembled.
If you’re in the UK, you can catch a program about it on the iPlayer for another week (sorry, fellow Yanks — I can’t watch Hulu, you can’t watch BBC). If not, you can follow the dig’s own site (excavation ended in August and will begin again in June, but there’s lots of background information). Oh, if you must, here’s an overview from the Daily Mail
January 2, 2012 — 9:15 pm
Comments: 30
Merry Ho Ho, y’all!
Midnight in Old Blighty. Uncle B wanted to wish you all a Merry Christmas, but he felt funny doing it in the Dead Pool thread.
So I made him this here post.
December 25, 2011 — 12:22 am
Comments: 60
I’m onna be a Limey!
Today is the third anniversary of the day I arrived in the UK, making me eligible to ask for citizenship (as a spouse; it’s five years if you’re here on a work visa). It doesn’t have any effect on my American citizenship and if I’m going to live here for the rest of my life, I demand the right to vote for a whole ‘nother bunch of useless lying politicians who won’t do a thing I agree with.
So that’ll be the end of my immigration adventures. My, how time flies when you’re drinking warm beer and eating jellied lamb’s knuckles.
Actually…it’s not quite time. I have to have sponsors attest my good character (hee hee!) and they have to swear they’ve known me for three years. The vicar for one, and we didn’t meet until December ’08 (for pre-marriage counseling. Brrrrrr).
Also, I need time to pull money over from the States to pay for this shindig. But they say you get a New Citizen Welcome Pack after you pinkie swear.
The picture? I ran across it on the Web today and thought it was funny. No idea where it comes from originally, but it was obviously done as a joke from the beginning.
Can you imagine the casting call on this one? “Ladies! Ladies! We need ten ugly ass-faced old cows who look like they’ve never been kissed in their lives…!”
Good weekend, everyone!
p.s. The cat got up on the counter and ate the turkey while we slept last night, so poor Uncle B didn’t get his turkey sangwich. Me, I trimmed off the gnawed bits, fed them to the outside cat and had myself some fine eating.
November 25, 2011 — 10:38 pm
Comments: 64