southmore

[Arnold M. Zwicky]

On Sep 23, 2007, at 10:47 AM, Charles Doyle wrote:

> Well, an old song of The Mamas and the Papas rhymed "sophomore"
> with "Swarthmore" (Mama Cass's purported alma mama).

well, there's a question here about what you mean by "rhyme".  i'm
guessing you mean that "sophomore" and "Swarthmore" occur in
positions in the song's pattern where rhyming words would be called
for.  but that doesn't mean they actually rhyme; half-rhyme is all
over the place, especially in rock music (i've written several times
on the subject).  we'd need to listen to recordings, of course, but
it would be not at all unexpected for the words to be pronounced
[safmor]  and [swaTmor] (the first r in Swarthmore is very commonly
not pronounced -- even for normally rhotic speakers like me), which
would be a fine half-rhyme, a case of "feature rhyme".

the example might even be in my rock rhyme corpus, but those data
have been shipped off to an archive.

arnold

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