Birth of a nova--not?

[Laurence Horn]

At 4:17 PM -0500 1/20/06, Benjamin Zimmer wrote:
>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
>
a few more (if Arnold et alii will pardon the half-rhymes in the
first two) appear below, but of course Ben's is the most apropos for
the truthinessy kind of verisimilitude we're dealing with here...

Larry

==================

Higgledy piggledy
Brutus et alii,
Murdered poor Caesar
On March the fifteenth

He should have heeded the
Verisimilitude
Couched in the warnings that
Came the fourteenth.

=================
Newscasts are telling us
Clinton the President
Injured his knee as he
Went out the door

Maybe he's showing us
Verisimilitude:
Deft re-enactment of
President Ford.

================
Quaxity quuxity,
NIL the atomic one
Acts like a wavicle,
Seemingly twin:
Not just the inverse of
Verisimilitude;
Also the inverse of
Where lists begin.

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