Tag Archives: listening

Eye tolled ewe sew – Homophones (Post 19)

Homophones are words which sound the same but are spelled differently – I/eye; told/tolled; you/ewe; so/sew. There are many in the English language.

Eye-rhyme is when this happens the other way around: words look as if they should rhyme, but they’re actually pronounced differently – rough, through, although, cough. The language is well supplied with traps for the unwary!

If you were brought up from your childhood to speak (and read and write) English, you are fortunate: you will have learned to avoid most of these traps almost as a matter of course.

Even native speakers can struggle at times, though. See how you get on with this ditty (a ditty is a short poem that rhymes very obviously and has a very distinct and simple rhythm), reading it for understanding. Read it aloud (it’s allowed …) if you want to make that easier!

Spell Chequer

Eye have a grate spell chequer:

It came with my pea sea.

It plainly marques four my revue

Miss steaks aye can knot sea.

Eye strike a quay and type a word,

And weight for it to say

Weather eye am wrong oar write;

It shows me strait a-weigh.

Whenever a mist ache is maid,

It nose bee four two long;

And eye can put the error rite.

It’s rare lea ever wrong.

Eye ran this poem threw it and

I’m shore your pleased two no

It’s letter perfect awl the weigh:

My chequer tolled me sew.

Puns (Activity 18)

Ben Battle was a soldier bold,

And used to war’s alarms:

A cannon-ball took off his legs,

So he laid down his arms!

This is the first verse of a rather silly poem which has a pun in almost every stanza (stanza is another word for verse, although stanzas don’t have to rhyme, whereas verse usually does).

Puns are plays on words. They usually depend on words having more than one meaning, or words which sound alike.

In the verse above, the pun is on arms. Arms – like legs – are limbs on the human body; but arms can also refer to weapons, such as the rifles that infantry soldiers use. (Infantry soldiers fought on foot originally, rather than on horseback; you’ll need to know this to appreciate another pun, later!)

A punster – a rather derogatory [insulting] term for someone who makes puns – might describe the unfortunate Ben Battle as ‘armless – making a pun on the fact that he has laid down his weapons and so can’t do any damage: he’s [h]armless. This is the second type of pun.

Puns can be “awful” – very contrived and possibly in bad taste! Most people appreciate them, however, even if they don’t want to hear them used too often.

The poem I’ve quoted, which is called Faithless Nelly Gray and was written by Thomas Hood, goes on to tell how army surgeons made Ben some wooden legs. When he goes to see his girlfriend, however, she dislikes them and says that he’s not the man she fell in love with – a handsome soldier in his (red) uniform. Ben suspects, though, that she has actually taken up with another man while he has been away in the wars. Distraught with grief, he takes his own life – but even this sad ending does not stop Thomas Hood filling his verses with puns!

I won’t reproduce the whole poem here, but see if you can explain the puns in each of the following stanzas:

Verse 2:

Now as they bore him off the field,

Said he, “Let others shoot,

For here I leave my second leg,

And the Forty-second Foot!”

Verse 3:

The army-surgeons made him limbs:

Said he, “They’re only pegs:

But there’s as wooden members quite,

As represent my legs!”

Verse 6:

“O Nelly Gray! O Nelly Gray!

Is this your love so warm?

The love that loves a scarlet coat

Should be more uniform!”

Verse 11:

“O false and fickle Nelly Gray!

I know why you refuse:

Though I’ve no feet – some other man

Is standing in my shoes!“

Rhythm (R-h-y [clap] t-h-m [clap]; R-h-y [clap] t-h-m [clap]) (Post 17)

Chants depend on rhythm for their effectiveness: think of Queen’s “We will, we will ROCK YOU [stamp] [stamp, stamp clap]”.

Protesters on a march or outside a key building will often start chanting, [Question] “What do we want?” [Answer] “Equal pay” (or whatever it is they want) [Question] “When do we want it?” [Answer] “NOW!”

RHYTHM is one of the most powerful devices we can use, to get our listeners’ attention.

REPETITION is also effective – as both Queen and the protesters described above realised.

Rhythm is a pattern of differently stressed sounds – generally either STRONG stresses or WEAK stresses. Let’s use DAH for a strong stress, and DIT for a weak one. So a toddler having a tantrum might say, “I want a toy”; what (s)he will probably do is stress the TOY word, and the pattern would be DIT DIT DIT DAH – “I want a TOY“.

If another child had a toy and ours wanted one as well, (s)he might say, “I want a toy” in the pattern DAH DIT DIT DIT – “I want a toy”.

If our toddler’s parent tried to reason with him/her, saying, “You don’t need a toy” the toddler might say, “I want a toy” with the stress on want – DIT DAH DIT DIT – “I WANT a toy”.

Not only does rhythm attract our listeners’ attention, it also helps to convey more exactly what we mean – as in the three different versions of “I want a toy” above.

Whenever we speak we use rhythm – the stress pattern of how I would say what I’ve just written is DIT-DAH-DIT DIT DAH DIT DIT DAH-DIT : Whenever we speak we use rhythm.

Each syllable of each word gets either a strong or a weak stress. “Whenever” has three syllables – when, ev and er. We (strong) stress the second syllable, and leave the other two with weak stresses: whenEVer.

Many words in English are only one syllable long (They’re called monosyllables). The stress we put on them depends on what we want to say – see the “toy” example above.

Rappers of course make the most extensive use of rhythm. Much of Shakespeare’s writing can be used as rap, because he too was very aware of the rhythm of how people speak. Here’s the opening of his play The Merchant of Venice, where Antonio is describing his depression to his friends:

In sooth, I know not why I am so sad:
It wearies me; you say it wearies you;
But how I caught it, found it, or came by it,
What stuff ’tis made of, whereof it is born,
I am to learn;
And such a want-wit sadness makes of me,
That I have much ado to know myself.

If you enjoy rapping, try saying these lines as rap.

Most of Shakespeare’s verse – but by no means all of it – falls into a pattern of DIT DAH DIT DAH DIT DAH DIT DAH DIT DAH – five pairs of syllables in each line, each pair a weak stress followed by a strong one. Some people have said that that is the pattern closest to the everyday speech of English-speaking people. (It’s known as iambic pentametre – just in case you’re interested.)

Try this: write down some examples of things you might say in everyday situations. (Write quite largely, as you need to be able to mark each syllable.) Now listen to yourself saying these things as you normally would, and put a mark above each syllable to show whether it’s WEAK or STRONG.

Mark weak syllables with a little dip-mark: Ῠ or Ῐ

Mark strong syllable with a little straight line: Ῡ or Ῑ

You’re well on your way to analysing poetry now – but I hope you’ll also have more fun when listening to the way you, and others, speak.

Rhyme (sounds like “rime”) (Post 16)

Our ears pick up rhyme, and so words that rhyme are more likely to attract our attention.

Babies and young children notice and enjoy rhyme from a very early stage of life. Along with rhythm – which we’ll tackle in a future post – rhyme is one of the most powerful ways of getting words noticed.

Rhyme can be irritating if you didn’t intend to use rhyming words – so it is useful to be able to avoid it, just as it is useful to be able to employ it when you choose to do so.

Once our ears and brain have picked up on a rhyming sound – EAR and HEAR, for example – they will be on the alert for more of these (DEAR, CHEER, FEAR, APPEAR …); so avoid over-use of rhyme if you want to keep your listener focused on the meaning of your words, rather than the sound of them.

That said, a “snappy” quotation using rhyme can effectively stay in a listener’s head for a lifetime. “A stitch in time saves nine” used to be a very popular proverb, meaning, “Put something right when you first notice it, or it’ll be a much bigger job later.” (TIME and NINE don’t rhyme exactly, but a close rhyme is often acceptable to our brains.)

“For as there is a certain time to rage / So is there time such madness to assuage” [assuage means calm down] is a piece of advice that was written about 500 years ago (by Sir Thomas Wyatt, who lived in the time of King Henry the Eighth) – and we can still understand and act by it today.

Thomas Wyatt wrote the words to songs (lyrics) amongst other things, and you’ll find that rhyme is still important in lyrics nowadays.

Can you make up rhymes? Can you spot them in time to avoid using them unintentionally in your speaking or writing?

How many words can you find to rhyme with each of the following?

HEAR; POUND; DOG; FOOD; CATCH; MOON; YOU; ME; LOVE; TOUGH.

Make up and write down some different rhymes of your own. You can go on with this for as long as you like; you might want to think of words with more than one syllable, as well – for example, FOLLOW; DAUGHTER; SEPARATE. Often these words will be rhymed only on the last syllable, for example SEPARATE with FORTUNATE; but two-syllable words can be rhymed completely to very good effect – for example FOLLOW/HOLLOW/SWALLOW/WALLOW and used for funny poems such as Limericks. (OK, we’ll look at limericks in more detail in a future post.)

Apparently there is no rhyme in the English language for the word ORANGE – so if you can find one, you might become famous!