[2321] in Central_America
New quotes for Sun Apr 1
daemon@ATHENA.MIT.EDU (daemon@ATHENA.MIT.EDU)
Sun Apr 1 01:29:53 1990
Date: Sun, 1 Apr 90 01:29:21 EST
From: root@CHARON.MIT.EDU (Initializer.SysDaemon)
To: ca-mtg@BLOOM-BEACON.MIT.EDU
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ambar (Jean Marie Diaz):
(Multi-national personnel at North Atlantic Treaty Organization
headquarters near Paris found English to be an easy language ...
until they tried to pronounce it. To help them discard an array
of accents, the verses below were devised. After trying them, a
Frenchman said he'd prefer six months at hard labor to reading
six lines aloud. Try them yourself.)
ENGLISH IS TOUGH STUFF
======================
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.
Tear in eye, your dress will tear.
So shall I! Oh hear my prayer.
Just compare heart, beard, and heard,
Dies and diet, lord and word,
Sword and sward, retain and Britain.
(Mind the latter, how it's written.)
Now I surely will not plague you
With such words as plaque and ague.
But be careful how you speak:
Say break and steak, but bleak and streak;
Cloven, oven, how and low,
Script, receipt, show, poem, and toe.
Hear me say, devoid of trickery,
Daughter, laughter, and Terpsichore,
Typhoid, measles, topsails, aisles,
Exiles, similes, and reviles;
Scholar, vicar, and cigar,
Solar, mica, war and far;
One, anemone, Balmoral,
Kitchen, lichen, laundry, laurel;
Gertrude, German, wind and mind,
Scene, Melpomene, mankind.
Billet does not rhyme with ballet,
Bouquet, wallet, mallet, chalet.
Blood and flood are not like food,
Nor is mould like should and would.
Viscous, viscount, load and broad,
Toward, to forward, to reward.
And your pronunciation's OK
When you correctly say croquet,
Rounded, wounded, grieve and sieve,
Friend and fiend, alive and live.
Ivy, privy, famous; clamour
And enamour rhyme with hammer.
River, rival, tomb, bomb, comb,
Doll and roll and some and home.
Stranger does not rhyme with anger,
Neither does devour with clangour.
Souls but foul, haunt but aunt,
Font, front, wont, want, grand, and grant,
Shoes, goes, does. Now first say finger,
And then singer, ginger, linger,
Real, zeal, mauve, gauze, gouge and gauge,
Marriage, foliage, mirage, and age.
Query does not rhyme with very,
Nor does fury sound like bury.
Dost, lost, post and doth, cloth, loth.
Job, nob, bosom, transom, oath.
Though the differences seem little,
We say actual but victual.
Refer does not rhyme with deafer.
Foeffer does, and zephyr, heifer.
Mint, pint, senate and sedate;
Dull, bull, and George ate late.
Scenic, Arabic, Pacific,
Science, conscience, scientific.
Liberty, library, heave and heaven,
Rachel, ache, moustache, eleven.
We say hallowed, but allowed,
People, leopard, towed, but vowed.
Mark the differences, moreover,
Between mover, cover, clover;
Leeches, breeches, wise, precise,
Chalice, but police and lice;
Camel, constable, unstable,
Principle, disciple, label.
Petal, panel, and canal,
Wait, surprise, plait, promise, pal.
Worm and storm, chaise, chaos, chair,
Senator, spectator, mayor.
Tour, but our and succour, four.
Gas, alas, and Arkansas.
Sea, idea, Korea, area,
Psalm, Maria, but malaria.
Youth, south, southern, cleanse and clean.
Doctrine, turpentine, marine.
Compare alien with Italian,
Dandelion and battalion.
Sally with ally, yea, ye,
Eye, I, ay, aye, whey, and key.
Say aver, but ever, fever,
Neither, leisure, skein, deceiver.
Heron, granary, canary.
Crevice and device and aerie.
Face, but preface, not efface.
Phlegm, phlegmatic, ass, glass, bass.
Large, but target, gin, give, verging,
Ought, out, joust and scour, scourging.
Ear, but earn and wear and tear
Do not rhyme with here but ere.
Seven is right, but so is even,
Hyphen, roughen, nephew Stephen,
Monkey, donkey, Turk and jerk,
Ask, grasp, wasp, and cork and work.
Pronunciation -- think of Psyche!
Is a paling stout and spikey?
Won't it make you lose your wits,
Writing groats and saying grits?
It's a dark abyss or tunnel:
Strewn with stones, stowed, solace, gunwale,
Islington and Isle of Wight,
Housewife, verdict and indict.
Finally, which rhymes with enough --
Though, through, plough, or dough, or cough?
Hiccough has the sound of cup.
My advice is to give up!!!
-- Author Unknown
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montreal (It's just Toby):
The Critical Curmudgeon (part one)
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With the single exception of Homer, there is no eminent writer, not
even Sir Walter Scott, whom I can despise so entirely as I despise
Shakespeare, when I measure my mind against his.
-- George Bernard Shaw --
Now we sit through Shakespeare in order to
recognize the quotations.
-- Oscar Wilde --
Hamlet is a coarse and barbarous play ... One might think the work is
a product of a drunken savage's imagination.
-- Voltaire --
Hamlet has been played by 5000 actors - no
wonder he is crazy.
-- H.L.Mencken --
Are the commentators on Hamlet really mad, or only pretending to be?
-- Oscar Wilde --
He had one of the more wicked minds ever
going.
-- Truman Capote on Mark Twain --
Mr. Henry James writes fiction as if it were a painful duty.
-- Oscar Wilde --
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swmpthng (Tim Stellmach):
Recently seen in rec.puzzles:
"1/9 and 1/49 are not rational numbers."
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tophe (Christopher M Hoadley):
To experience life to the fullest.
To enjoy what there is to enjoy without reservation.
To live.
To laugh.
To love.
Epsilon Theta
tophe@athena.mit.edu 259 Saint Paul Street
tophe@media-lab.media.mit.edu Brookline, MA 02146
(617)734-0648 or 253-8973 (both home)
--- End of Central America ---
