Most inane couplet

Subject: RE: Most inane couplet
From: GUEST,es&l
Date: 05 Jan 08 - 06:31 AM

"..... poetry at it's beat "

grammar AND spelling at its (sic) worst ! :-)

Subject: RE: Most inane couplet
From: Amos
Date: 05 Jan 08 - 07:03 AM

I have rhymed "orange" hear at Mudcat perfectly well a couple of times. I believe one was with "more ang-
elic...."

You could look it up.


A

Subject: RE: Most inane couplet
From: Amos
Date: 05 Jan 08 - 07:09 AM

ubject: RE: BS: Difficult rhymes
From: Amos - PM
Date: 17 Mar 04 - 12:02 PM

I have pale pansies on my plot,
And roses, red and orange.
Nasturtiums I will not have
And likewise ugly foreign ge-
Rmaniums to clutter up the view
How about you?

---

ubject: RE: BS: Difficult rhymes
From: Amos - PM
Date: 08 Jan 05 - 11:15 AM

My love's as full as any orange
Except when I am feeling poor; Ang-
ina also chills the storm,
Making it difficult to perform.

But there is always hope for me;
A visit to a pharmacy!
Cialis will for sure restore ang-
Elic wholeness to my orange!

(c) 2004 "Mad Amos" Jessup

Twice in eight lines!! I haven't done that sort of thing in years!!

---

It's all in the wrist, folks...



A

Subject: RE: Most inane couplet
From: McGrath of Harlow
Date: 05 Jan 08 - 07:22 AM

"Both Father, Son, and Holy Ghost ..."

Not ungrammatical or illogical when indicating two or more - merely "archaic, used only in old-fashioned (or religious or legal) speech or writing" (Concise Oxford Dictionary).

It's rather hard to see why the usage has been abandoned generally - there is no convenient way of conveying the same meaning.

Subject: RE: Most inane couplet
From: Bonnie Shaljean
Date: 05 Jan 08 - 08:52 AM

So "both" can actually indicate more than two? Fair enough... never get too old to learn something new every day :-)

OK, so - you want naff?

Juices you pour range
From apple to orange

Subject: RE: Most inane couplet
From: Tattie Bogle
Date: 05 Jan 08 - 11:44 AM

Another Scots one:
Humpty Dumpty sat on his erse
Writing verses exceedingly terse

Subject: RE: Most inane couplet
From: John MacKenzie
Date: 05 Jan 08 - 11:48 AM

They took the last train for the coast, Bonnie.
The day the music died!

G

Subject: RE: Most inane couplet
From: GUEST,The Mole Catcher's Apprentice
Date: 05 Jan 08 - 01:02 PM

Yes...well..ummmmmmm?....My God! is it REALLY that time? I really DO have to run....

Subject: RE: Most inane couplet
From: john f weldon
Date: 05 Jan 08 - 02:03 PM

Oh my. I once wrote...

I would like to purchase an orange
Do you have one of diameter four-inch?

...but I wish I hadn't, or even mentioned it here.

But this is from a quite serious poem on the Death of Queen Victoria...

Dust to dust and ashes to ashes..
Into the tomb the great Queen dashes!

Subject: RE: Most inane couplet
From: DannyC
Date: 05 Jan 08 - 02:08 PM

The opening couplet from the whimsical 'In Praise of Mullingar':

"You can strain your muscles to brag of Brussels
Vienna, Naples or Timbuktu..."

... or something like that.

Subject: RE: Most inane couplet
From: Little Hawk
Date: 05 Jan 08 - 02:19 PM

Didn't Men At Work do that tune with a couple of lines that rhymed "Brussels" and "muscles"?

Subject: RE: Most inane couplet
From: alanabit
Date: 05 Jan 08 - 02:31 PM

Yes - in "Down Under".

Subject: RE: Most inane couplet
From: Brendy
Date: 05 Jan 08 - 04:09 PM

I know it's the respected Mr Loewe..., and I know it's not a couplet, but after the first verse:

Away out here they got a name
For rain and wind and fire
The rain is Tess, the fire Joe,
And they call the wind Maria

..., not a whisper about Tess and Joe...
I wonder what ever happened to them?

B.

Subject: RE: Most inane couplet
From: Waddon Pete
Date: 05 Jan 08 - 04:12 PM

It must have been an awful sight,
To witness in the dusky moonlight,
While the Storm Fiend did laugh, and angry did bray,
Along the Railway Bridge of the Silv'ry Tay,
Oh! ill-fated Bridge of the Silv'ry Tay,
I must now conclude my lay
By telling the world fearlessly without the least dismay,
That your central girders would not have given way,
At least many sensible men do say,
Had they been supported on each side with buttresses,
At least many sensible men confesses,
For the stronger we our houses do build,
The less chance we have of being killed

William McGonigle

Excellent Poetry!

Best wishes,

Peter

Subject: RE: Most inane couplet
From: Bonnie Shaljean
Date: 05 Jan 08 - 04:14 PM

I think he's the one who rhymed Bother me and Rather be in Leeneia's post above -

Subject: RE: Most inane couplet
From: Bonnie Shaljean
Date: 05 Jan 08 - 04:15 PM

Wooops, cross-posted: Mine was in response to Brendy

Subject: RE: Most inane couplet
From: Brendy
Date: 05 Jan 08 - 04:23 PM

Jazus Bonnie, how's it goin'?
Lerner & Loewe... leenia's is from 'My Fair Lady', I think.
A rhyme is a rhyme, I suppose, if you get away with it... :-)

B.

Subject: RE: Most inane couplet
From: cptsnapper
Date: 05 Jan 08 - 04:25 PM

I've just been listening to an album called Tuesday, April 19th recorded by a group called The Unspoken Word & in my opinion the whole thing is inane. I feel that it's a shame that the people concerned didn't think about the inherent implication of the their chosen name. But that's only my opinion - feel free to disagree, I won't take it personally!

Subject: RE: Most inane couplet
From: Uncle_DaveO
Date: 06 Jan 08 - 12:52 PM

Someone at least impliedly criticized

I don't want a pickle, just wanna ride my motor-sickle'
'And I don't wanna die! Just wanna ride my motorcy------cle

It's a comic song, fergoonessake! In that context, that "die"-rhyming line is pure genius! I keep listening to the song, impatiently listening for that wonderful line!

Dave Oesterreich

Subject: RE: Most inane couplet
From: Little Hawk
Date: 06 Jan 08 - 01:35 PM

Yeah, you shouldn't criticize a deliberately goofy comedy song for having a goofy lyric...

Subject: RE: Most inane couplet
From: The Sandman
Date: 06 Jan 08 - 07:03 PM

I would like to quote Cumberland Clark[a second rate McGonagle]here he is on:
Spain.
In the south west of Europes the Kingdom of Spain,
where good southern blood permeates every vein.
The people are passionate,loving and warm:
and impromptu affections considered good form.
All the dear pretty girls carry on so
and im sorry theyve turned down Alfonso.

Subject: RE: Most inane couplet
From: Little Hawk
Date: 06 Jan 08 - 11:38 PM

Oh, my! He really hits the heights of almost MacGonagalesque glory on the last 2 lines, doesn't he?

Subject: RE: Most inane couplet
From: GUEST,squeezeme
Date: 07 Jan 08 - 08:53 AM

Some pretty inane ones on grave stones too....

"Here lies dentist Rafferty
Filling his last cavity"

Subject: RE: Most inane couplet
From: Brendy
Date: 07 Jan 08 - 01:56 PM

"Stranger approach this grave with gravity
Charles Grey has filled his last cavity"

Spike Milligan on his show "Muses With Milligan" way back in the '60's devoted part of his programmes to these kind of rhymes.

'A baby Sardine saw his first submarine
He was scared, and watched through a peepholr
"Oh, come, come, come," said the Sardine's mum
"It's only a tinful of people'

B.

Subject: RE: Most inane couplet
From: Brendy
Date: 07 Jan 08 - 01:57 PM

... sorry..., that 2nd line should read.... 'peephole'

B.

Subject: RE: Most inane couplet
From: Peace
Date: 07 Jan 08 - 02:14 PM

I want to enter the competition.

"My heart's beating like a tympani
In a symphony of love"

Took me seven hours to come up with that one and when I got it I put it in a song.

Subject: RE: Most inane couplet
From: Midchuck
Date: 07 Jan 08 - 02:21 PM

Some of Kipling's best (from the Rhyme of the Three Captains).

I turn to them when I'm really mad at someone:

Had I had guns (as I had goods) to work my Christian harm,
I had run him up from his quarter-deck to trade with his own yard-arm;
I had nailed his ears to my capstan-head, and ripped them off with a saw,
And soused them in the bilgewater, and served them to him raw;
I had flung him blind in a rudderless boat to rot in the rocking dark,
I had towed him aft of his own craft, a bait for his brother shark;
I had lapped him round with cocoa husk, and drenched him with the oil,
And lashed him fast to his own mast to blaze above my spoil;
I had stripped his hide for my hammock-side,
and tasselled his beard i' the mesh,
And spitted his crew on the live bamboo
that grows through the gangrened flesh;
I had hove him down by the mangroves brown,
where the mud-reef sucks and draws,
Moored by the heel to his own keel to wait for the land-crab's claws!

Peter

Subject: RE: Most inane couplet
From: Dave the Gnome
Date: 07 Jan 08 - 02:30 PM

What No mention yet of the Turtles?

I really think you're groovy
Let's go out to a movie

Your lips intixciate me
Even though your folks hate me

Surely it doesn't get any better than this!

:D

Subject: RE: Most inane couplet
From: Dave the Gnome
Date: 08 Jan 08 - 05:56 PM

Do I win then?

:D

Subject: RE: Most inane couplet
From: JennieG
Date: 08 Jan 08 - 07:14 PM

What about Hallejula by Leonard Cohen....

'Had it coming to ya' rhyming with 'hallejula'

I really dislike that song, I shudder every time I hear it.

Cheers
JennieG....pedant, and proud of it!

Subject: RE: Most inane couplet
From: Joe_F
Date: 08 Jan 08 - 08:30 PM

All on the southbound odyssey,
The train pulls out of Kankakee,

Subject: RE: Most inane couplet
From: RobbieWilson
Date: 09 Jan 08 - 06:51 AM

you talk to me in sign language
while I'm eatinga sandwich...
( Sign language sung by eric clapton, mid 70's)


She's always looking as if
she's always wandering off a cliff

(Thank the stars we're not as smart as we like to think we are, forget who sang this in the 70's)

Subject: RE: Most inane couplet
From: Jack Campin
Date: 09 Jan 08 - 08:09 AM

Here comes the Wapiti
Hippity-hoppity

is not by Ogden Nash but by the New Zealand poet Denis Glover. Wapiti were the biggest animal introduced to NZ by the Europeans. I have no idea why.

Subject: RE: Most inane couplet
From: GUEST,HughM
Date: 10 Jan 08 - 08:21 AM

Just walking in the rain,
Getting soaking wet.

B'fhea\rr leam fhin gum beireadh an t-e/ile,
Ma\ireach dhe na h-eireagan...
(I wish the other pullet would lay an egg tomorrow.)

What was that about foreign GERMANIUMS? Different isotopes from the usual kind?

Subject: RE: Most inane couplet
From: Splott Man
Date: 10 Jan 08 - 09:37 AM

Robbie...

It was Dean Friedman, he could only sing at one volume setting.

Subject: RE: Most inane couplet
From: GUEST,Neil D
Date: 10 Jan 08 - 10:06 AM

Not really a couplet but from a song by Devandra Banhart who is not Chinese:
      If I lived in China I'd have Chinese children
      If I lived in Japan I'd still have Chinese children
   Speaking of epitaphs:
                Here lies Lester Moore
                Shot to death with a 44
                No Les
                No Moore
   Or how about almost every Hallmark card ever written.

Subject: RE: Most inane couplet
From: GUEST,acorn4
Date: 10 Jan 08 - 10:08 AM

What about:-

"There was music there
In the Derry Air."

Subject: RE: Most inane couplet
From: GUEST,acorn4
Date: 10 Jan 08 - 01:48 PM

The of course there's the Rod Stewart classic:-

He took her up to his high rise apartment,
And there he told her exactly what his heart meant.

Accompanied, of course, by that famous "sitting on a French toilet" pose.

Subject: RE: Most inane couplet
From: Schantieman
Date: 10 Jan 08 - 02:30 PM

W S Gilbert made so many of these rhymes they're described as 'Gilbertian' and so did Tom Lehrer. Mostly, however for comic effect, so inanity may be a positive boon.

Ring the merry bells on board-ship,
Rend the air with warbling wild,
For the union of his/my lordship
With a humble captain's child!

Pretty daughter of mine,
                   I insist upon knowing
                   Where you may be going
               With these sons of the brine,
                   For my excellent crew,
               Though foes they could thump any,
               Are scarcely fit company,
                   My daughter, for you.



I'm sorry to be
               Of your pleasure a diminutioner.
                   They'll vow their pact
                         Extremely soon,
                   In point of fact
                         This afternoon.
                         Her honeymoon
                         With that buffoon
               At seven commences, so you shun her


The pluck of Lord Nelson on board of the Victory—
                        Genius of Bismarck devising a plan—
                The humour of Fielding (which sounds contradictory)—
                        Coolness of Paget about to trepan—
                The science of Jullien, the eminent musico—
                        Wit of Macaulay, who wrote of Queen Anne—
                The pathos of Paddy, as rendered by Boucicault—
                        Style of the Bishop of Sodor and Man—
                The dash of a D'Orsay, divested of quackery—
                Narrative powers of Dickens and Thackeray—
                Victor Emmanuel — peak-haunting Peveril—
                Thomas Aquinas, and Doctor Sacheverell—
                        Tupper and Tennyson — Daniel Defoe—
                        Anthony Trollope and Mister Guizot! Ah


...and from the pen of Dr Lehrer, I suggest...

These are the only ones of which the news has come to Harvard
And there may be many others but they haven't been discarvard.


Discuss.


Steve

Subject: RE: Most inane couplet
From: Schantieman
Date: 10 Jan 08 - 02:34 PM

And what about a rhyme for "month"?

I have two.....


How many weeks in a month?
Four, as the swift moon runn'th.

(C Rosetti)



Amongst our many English rhymes
They say there's none for 'month'.
I tried and failed a hundered times

.


.



.



.



But I got it the hundred and oneth!


(Don't blame me.   Blame Johnathan Always.)


Steve

Subject: RE: Most inane couplet
From: Mooh
Date: 11 Jan 08 - 08:00 AM

"Sometimes when we touch
The honesty's too much" (Dan Hill maybe)

We used to do a parody of it as a breakup sex song,

"Sometimes when we fuck
I feel like such a schmuck",

but audiences didn't always appreciate the humour.

Peace, Mooh.

Subject: RE: Most inane couplet
From: GUEST,No Friend of Dorothy's
Date: 11 Jan 08 - 10:15 AM

"I've measured it from side to side;
'Twas four feet long, and two feet wide"

W Wordsworth, "The Thorn"



"Now, of my three score years and ten
Twenty will not come again;
And take from seventy years a score,
It only leaves me fifty more"

Housman.


As Byron said of the one, and might have done of the other, he

"both by precept and example shows
That prose is verse, and verse is merely prose"

Subject: RE: Most inane couplet
From: Tattie Bogle
Date: 12 Jan 08 - 09:20 AM

From one of my own:
Napoli should be abandoned,
Get her men all back on land......and

Napoli was heavy laden,
With containers she was weighed down.

And another (song for my Dad!);
Before much longer he became a Branch Manager
And travelled round the winding lanes of sunny East Anglia.

By the way, Robbie W, in Scotland they tend to say "sangwich" instead of sandwich, which does rhyme quite well with "language".

Subject: RE: Most inane couplet
From: Waddon Pete
Date: 12 Jan 08 - 03:53 PM

I said, "Pretty fair maid I'm out for my fun!
If to Chelsea you'll follow I'll buy you a bun!"

Traditional folk music...can't be beat!

Best wishes,

Peter

Subject: RE: Most inane couplet
From: Canberra Chris
Date: 12 Jan 08 - 06:30 PM

The fruit that the English call 'orange'
They first, from the Spanish, called 'norange'.

I have read that the Spanish 'naranja' was first transferred into English as 'a norange', and like some other words with initial 'n' had elided in oral transmission into 'an orange'. My smallish dictionary doesn't say so, but does give the derivation as from Arabic 'naranj', which would have come through the Spanish, also from the Old French 'norenge', which adds plausibility. After all we didn't go with 'oconuts, 'ananas, 'omatoes or 'otatoes. Why would we go with 'orange?

Doesn't help with the rhyme, except for the above.

There are commoner rhyme traps too, I ended a song line with 'have' ...

From memory, a most unfortunate if not inane couplet from Drink To Me Only (he sends his love a rose - now read on):

'But thou thereon didst only breathe, and and send'st it back to me
Where now I swear it looks and smells not of itself but thee'

Impossible to sing now with a straight face, especially as 'smells' is a melodic highlight.

BTW re Gundagai above, I'll leave confirmation to the more knowledgable Oz tradition keepers, but as with the many collected English folk songs gentrified for publication, I understand that the dog originally 'shat' on the tuckerbox, as only fits properly the 'final straw' sense of the lines, and the humour and language of the times.

Chris

Subject: RE: Most inane couplet
From: alanabit
Date: 12 Jan 08 - 07:00 PM

"Didn't Men At Work do that tune with a couple of lines that rhymed "Brussels" and "muscles"? "

I wonder if Little Hawk recalls a song with the lines:

"I left Rome and landed in Brussels
With a picture of a tall oak tree by the side
There was clergymen in uniform and young girls pulling muscles
Everybody was there but nobody tried to hide..."

Colin Hay was not the first to use that rhyme!

Subject: RE: Most inane couplet
From: michaelr
Date: 12 Jan 08 - 07:17 PM

Alan, is that what Dylan wrote? I have it as

I left Rome and landed in Brussels
On a plane ride so bumpy that I almost cried
There were clergymen in uniform and young girls pulling mussels
All there to greet me when I stepped inside

Cheers,
Michael

Subject: RE: Most inane couplet
From: alanabit
Date: 13 Jan 08 - 04:01 AM

You could well be right Michael, but then again, we could both be. Dylan revises and improvises lyrics all the time, so we could well both have an authoritative source, which is different. The version I knew best (haven't heard it for ages), was the opening song of the "Renaldo and Claire" fiasco, although that bit of footage was not without charm. (Dylan seemed to be giggling all the way through).
I think I got the lyrics I learned from a songbook.

Subject: RE: Most inane couplet
From: Splott Man
Date: 14 Jan 08 - 07:41 AM

In the marquee, the band played on
The bodhrans and dancing feet thundered...

Subject: RE: Most inane couplet
From: Splott Man
Date: 14 Jan 08 - 07:43 AM

The craic may be 90 in the Isle of Man,
But in Brideswell the craic was 100.

Ithangyou!

I wrote that.


100!!!