Gnu ears eavesdropping

My mother sent me a link to this amazing doggerel (credited to G. Nolst Trenité) about the insane relationship between English spelling and pronunciation, which I quote from here (the link’s poem is much, much longer):

Dearest creature in creation,
Study English pronunciation.
I will teach you in my verse
Sounds like corpse, corps, horse, and worse.
I will keep you, Suzy, busy,
Make your head with heat grow dizzy.

It goes on for 112 lines. There are a few that I only got right by the skin of my rhyme scheme and a bloody-minded adherence to the poem’s local meter, even when I knew the words’ meanings:

Hear me say, devoid of trickery,
Daughter, laughter, and Terpsichore[…]
Gertrude, German, wind and mind,
Scene, Melpomene, mankind.

…a penchant for reading Greek mythology as a kid goes a long way — I knew that Terpsichore was the muse of dance — but D’Aulaires doesn’t tell you that “Terpsichore” rhymes with “trickery”. A few others I whiffed on (viscount, Balmoral) are inkhorn terms to me, largely because I’ve only ever read them in period pieces from the east side of the Atlantic.

The link’s framing text claims, suspiciously, that

If you can pronounce correctly every word in this poem, you will be speaking English better than 90% of the native English speakers in the world.

… which triggered my “lazy writer’s bad statistics” alarm: I couldn’t get all of them right, and I have empirical evidence (what, the GRE isn’t empirical?) that my mastery of English sesquipedaliana is in the 99th percentile. The subsequent citation to “a Frenchman” further suggests that the framing author is just looking for some catchy-sounding but un-accountable numbers (N words for snow?) to spice up the writing.


Posted

in

,

by

Tags:

Comments

3 responses to “Gnu ears eavesdropping”

  1. Eldan Avatar

    Of course, there’s also the question of what it means to speak English [and which English?] “better than” other people.

    1. Jeremy Avatar
      Jeremy

      Point!

      I was perhaps overly charitable when I interpreted “speaking English better than …” to mean “cope with these perversely chosen exceptions and quirky corner cases of English spelling better than …”.

      This is of course is not “speaking” at all. And it’s only “better” in that it demonstrates a certain mastery of a particular prestige trivia domain (though that mastery is closely tied to performance on the GRE verbal section, at least in my experience).

  2. Mickey Avatar
    Mickey

    I’m glad you enjoyed this. I certainly did! I knew Terpsichore, thanks to Praetorius, but not Melpomene, but like you, got it because of the meter (sort of).

    I was telling Ellie about this and she fondly remembered your rendering of youth as YOWth 🙂

    And by the way, I totally agree about the unnecessary and ridiculous statistics. What is “better” in this context anyway?

Leave a Reply

Your email address will not be published. Required fields are marked *