Birth of a nova--not?

[Benjamin Zimmer]

On 1/20/06, Laurence Horn <laurence.horn at yale.edu> wrote:
>
> Alice quoth:
> >As for the pronunciation difficulties, it's the stress pattern. The
> >similarities with VERitable lead me to VERisimilitude, which has too
> >many unstressed syllables in sequence. The alternative, verisiMIlitude
> >suffers from a similar problem.
> >
> Well, given the usual rules, you'll end up with secondary stress on
> the first syllable to go with the primary on the antepenult, which
> seems just right:  vèrisimílitude--a classical double dactyl, as in
> "microbiology" or "audiovisual" or "Afro-American" or
> "nymphomanical".  In fact if you've composed or read any
> double-dactyls (those "higgledy-piggledy" poems of the form invented,
> or perfected, by Anthony Hecht and Yale's own John Hollander, you've
> encountered one per poem in the third line of the second stanza.  Cf.
> e.g.
>
> http://lonestar.texas.net/~robison/dactyls.html
> http://www.stinky.com/dactyl/dactyl.html#poems
> http://www.sfu.ca/~finley/dactyl.html

Here's a pertinent example from Robin Pemantle:

  Ollie!

  Higgelgate, Piggelgate,
    Oliver, Oliver
    cleaned out his files to
    clean up his act
  letting him substitute
    somewhat revisionist
    verisimilitude
    after the fact.               -RP (1987)

http://www.math.upenn.edu/~pemantle/Higgeldy.html


--Ben Zimmer

------------------------------------------------------------
The American Dialect Society - http://www.americandialect.org