southmore

[Charles Doyle]

Of course.  Inexact rhymes also proliferate in folklongs and ballads, C&W songs, and rap lyrics. My young colleague Shigeto Kawahara studies the "rhymes" occurring in Japanese rap lyrics (amply citing the work of ArnoldZ).

The advantage of examining rhymes in popular genres is that the rhymes are likely to be "intended" (within some parameters of permissibility). With cononical poetry, we tend to credit a creative avoidence of exact rhymes in favor of ostensibly subtler effects.

--Charlie
____________________________________________________________



---- Original message ----
>Date: Sun, 23 Sep 2007 11:51:18 -0700
>From: "Arnold M. Zwicky" <zwicky at CSLI.STANFORD.EDU>
>
>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

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