An enjoyable adaptation of a song many of us already know
can be found at
http://www.quigmans.com/elements.swf

("worth the bandwidth," says my hypercritical son)

Ah, the always enjoyable Tom Lehrer! One of my chemistry teachers tried to get us to learn this when we were at school. I already knew it, since my father is a fan, but the idea went down like a lead balloon with the rest of the 14 year old girls in the class...

Ros

...was a Tom Lehrer revival that toured fifteen or twenty years ago. I took my wife and kids to see it in Boston, and we got there early enough to meet some of the cast. Same son-with-the-very-high-standards mentioned above, then twelve or so, floored the players by reeling off the first verse a capella when challenged...it's a family tradition at my end too! :-)

What's frightening about the Tom Lehrer songs is how many of them are still painfully appropriate today, nearly fifty years later.

Oh, haberdasher, that was wonderful! I chuckled at his rhyming of "Harvard" and "discovered", thinking of the "tsk tsk's" from CJ!

quote:

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Originally posted by Kalleh:
I chuckled at his rhyming of "Harvard" and "discovered", thinking of the "tsk tsk's" from CJ!

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None are forthcoming.

Stretching a rhyme for the purpose of humor is not only permissible in my book but highly desirable, especially when done with the panache (that's "puh-NASH," not "PAN-ake") that Tom Lehrer exhibited.

Besides Lehrer, there was also, of course, Ogden Nash, another personal hero of mine, and if there are others equally capable of twisting the sound of the language like a clown creating a balloon animal, they've yet to be "discarvard." By me, anyway.

It's probably repeating a dead horse, but isn't there a word for breaking words in unexpected places and using their middle syllables at the end of a line to make a rhyme (as Ogden Nash did so often and so beautifully) ?

[This message was edited by haberdasher on Wed May 28th, 2003 at 19:21.]

quote:

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Originally posted by haberdasher:
... isn't there a word for breaking words in unexpected places and using their middle syllables at the end of a line to make a rhyme ...?

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Yes.
(Oh! You also want to know what it is? I can't recall. )

I nominate "ogdennashination" as in:

Among all leaders, the person who
Bush wants dead is Saddam Hu-
Sein.
Though our policy is dumb,
We are told we shouldn't com-
Plain.

To the inspectors we instruct:
"Find those weapons of mass destruc-
Tion.
Don't say they're not there or we
Will be sunk 'fore we are be-
Gun."


Hot damn! I may have just invented a new poem structure!

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Hot damn! I may have just invented a new poem structure!

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Oh, Dear Lord! There is no stopping him now!