southmore

[Wilson Gray]

And there are those cases in which words don't rhyme at all in the
standard language, but become exact rhymes as a result of the singer's
dialect:

I used to search all night for you, baby
Knowing that my search would always end in _vain_
I used to search all night for you, baby
Knowing that my search would always end in _vain_
'Cause I knew all along, darling,
That you was hid out with your other _man_

-Wilson

On 9/24/07, Charles Doyle <cdoyle at uga.edu> wrote:
> ---------------------- Information from the mail header -----------------------
> Sender:       American Dialect Society <ADS-L at LISTSERV.UGA.EDU>
> Poster:       Charles Doyle <cdoyle at UGA.EDU>
> Subject:      Re: southmore
> -------------------------------------------------------------------------------
>
> 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
>
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--
All say, "How hard it is that we have to die"---a strange complaint to
come from the mouths of people who have had to live.
-----
                                              -Sam'l Clemens

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