Are you sure you saw GB Shaw on the sea shore?

In British almost all the vowels rhyme, no?

reminds me of how the spice girls managed to rhyme “holler” with “follow” 😄

You know how Shakespeare messes with every high schooler’s head rhyming “love” with “prove”? In Early Modern British, MFs said “pruhve”.

Orphan/Often

That isn't a rhyming pair in RP/SSBE (the accent in which "really" and "sincerely" rhyme). The vowels are different: "often" /ˈɒfən/ — the "o" in "bot", "socks", "off"; "orphan" /ˈɔːfən/ — first vowel as in "law", "spore", "thought". These vowels have merged in General American.

You might wish to take it up with WS Gilbert.

Isn’t that particular exchange also reliant on everyone speaking a particularly plummy version of the Queen’s English, which is part of why it’s funny?

Well, if we're going back *that* far then you could easily have found Americans for whom those words rhymed as well.

See Mr Dreyer' original post regarding _British_ musicals

Yes, that's the point: in British musicals today, one could quite easily find "thought" rhymed with "support", because for most speakers in England today "thought" and "support" rhyme. For those same speakers *today*, "often" and "orphan" do not rhyme.

If we go back to the 19th century, the situation is different. But it would also have been different in the US.

I'm pretty sure the o in "often" used to be long and open in RP in my youth.

I think that depends how one defines RP; I imagine the King rhymes them but he's something of an outlier.

*in my youth*. 😄 He and I were born within a few months of each other. His children and their spouses speak quite differently.

Indeed they do! But I think RP was changing even when Charles was born, and even by the standards of conservative RP he's a conservative speaker. William and Harry speak differently, and don't rhyme "often" and "orphan", but it seems to me that they still speak RP (as opposed to e.g. my SSBE).

When I lived in AUS and I read my children books, the rhymes often did not work with my American accent. In Macca the Alpaca there is a character “Harmer the Llama” and my children would protest I was incorrect.

Cool!

Indeed it would.

Oh, that’s lovely.

Yes. Indeed.

Budapest Ruder pest

The name “Shaun the Sheep” is much more of a direct pun on “shorn the sheep” in an English accent than in a U.S. accent.

On a coincidental related note: I'm now listening to a podcast episode in which two Australian men are discussing the movie Leprechaun, and one of them 100% sounds as though he's saying "Leprecorn."

omg

I was hoping someone's mind would be blown by this 😆

Mine was! I'll be sharing this randomly all day

I caught that one because I saw the original Wallace and Gromit first. He gets shorn and they say ‘we’ll call him Shaun/Shorn’.

It took me a while to even realise that it wasn't an anti-Irish jibe.

My husband is British. Turns out, my husband can not say (the tv show) "Pawn Stars" in mixed American company ... 😳🤣🤣

I done a poem once that rhymed 'status' with 'potatoes', which works in a few English accents and also Texan apparently

I moved from the UK at 16 and my accent became very American but I could not use phonics to teach my daughter to read. Because what do you mean "due", "dew", and "do" all rhyme with each other??

There's a fun viral video of University of Maryland football players saying "Aaron earned an iron urn" in their Balitmore accents www.facebook.com/reel/1284561...

In my central NYS Appalachian, urn and earn are the same word, iron and Arron have different front vowels, but all are one syllable words.

a friend once complained via text that her boyfriend pronounced "karaage" like "garage," and after agreeing that was awful, I thought about it further, and because he was British had to seek further clarification.

It doesn't help when there are (at least) three different pronunciations of "garage" guh-RAZH GA-razh garridge

D1 (went to a posh girls' school) rhymes 'hair', 'wear' and 'there' but not remotely how they are written 😑 Sorta 'haah, waah and thaah' 🫡🤷‍♂️

Air hair lair How to say 👋 in posh

Ah-hah-lah 🙈 As the Supreme Being™️ says, like you have a plum in your mouth and a carrot up your arse 🫡

Also rhyme in Liverpudlian English: huuh, wuuh, thuuh.

Also perhaps if set in Baltimore?

That put a smile on my face.

🤣 I am currently trying to make this work in my mind. Ty for providing entertainment for the next few minutes

I have seen British children's books that rhyme bloomers with satsumas, and claws with dinosaurs. (The very presence of “bloomers” is, I suppose, worth noting.)

How do Americans pronounce satsumas?

We pronounce “bloomers” with an “r.” Errr, not ah.

Oh, of course :)

As an English person reading this it's odd to us that you'd think those words don't rhyme.

It's not that we *think* they don't rhyme. They *don't* rhyme in our English.

Well 'bath' rhymes with 'calf' but travel fifty miles here and 'bath' will rhyme with 'math' so it's kind of accepted that most words can be pronounced differently by different regions.

BINGO, BABY

If you want to hear the rhyme in action, by the way, this is the song that inspired the thought, charmingly sung by charming Hayley Mills.

Sorry, did you say "the song that inspired the thought," or "the song that inspired the support"? I didn't quite catch it.

Ha ha ha ha ha!

Probably would have helped if whichever you'd said had been supported by a rhyme to give me context. Ah well.

I always took the differences in US and UK English in stride, and was suitably amused by them, until I learned that Brits (some? all? I haven't met everyone) pronounce "twat" to rhyme with "cat" and not "hot." And I resent that I had to learn that from Gwyneth G.D. Paltrow in Sliding Doors.

John Cooper Clarke taught me that!

I've run up against certain upper class twats who've used the latter pronunciation. It has to be said that the former is immensely more satisfying, especially when shouted.

Americans say it that way too

Definitely the former. So ‘that twat’ rhymes and ‘what twat?’ doesn’t.

I was really confused the first time I heard Americans saying 'twot'. I mean, the 'a' is right there in the middle of the word :p

All the better to really hit that final t

To a Brit ear*, the American pronunciation of it always sounds like the speaker is somehow trying to make it less rude. Like gosh instead of God. *well my British ear at least

Brit here. 'Twat' rhymes with 'cat' and always has. As in Browning's unfortunate lines in 'Pippa Passes' Then, owls and bats, cowls and twats, Monks and nuns, in a cloister’s moods, Adjourn to the oak-stump pantry! He thought a twat was a kind of wimple. Not so. It means then what it means now.

Best me to it.

Unless it's the Orkney town name Twatt. That rhymes with hot.

Good to know!

"HOW DO THEY NOT???" inquires person who has apparently never heard an American speak English and can't even imagine such a thing.

I wrote a whole paper in my sociolinguistics class about how post-vocalic R deletion + vowel elongation in British English makes for nonsensical rhymes to speakers of American English. I only recall that I used examples from The Beatles and Robbie Williams. And that I got a 98 on it.

I’m sitting here on a train (in an otherwise-empty carriage), using my very best American accent in an attempt to figure it out….

The Brits, if memory serves, have a good eight ways of pronouncing "ough," and those of us this side of the pond have our nine. (It's my favorite tetragraph)

Or indeed any one of the dozen UK regional accents where the 'r' is sounded. We Brits really have a long way to go to get over BBC being the only UK accent that matters

I wouldn't be that surprised if the sounded r in rt sounds is present in more accents of English than it is absent

the please don't be a performatively disingenuous prat in my mentions challenge

Is that pronounced 'prat', or 'prot'? :p

Maybe that was a twat rhymes with cat. But I've been here many years and still can't "hear" your objection to the rhyming of "thought" with "support".

I mean, it was slightly performative given that most of my followers are British...

Relatedly (?), I only recently figured out how the internet joke "smol" works, because for Americans, "small" and "smol" pretty much sound the same. For us, they are completely different, and the joke was never a great fit :p

I do recall a Britishperson once declaring themself entirely unable to understand why I didn't hear a legit rhyme in: I know that quite sincerely Housman really Wrote the Shropshire Lad about the boy. Like, because I'm an American?

It's why Americans don't get why Eeyore is named that!

I've spent the past 48 years never once thinking of how a British person might pronounce "Eeyore", and why that might be an onomatopoeia instead of (or as) a name. You have opened my eyes! Or, I guess, my ears.

Ah yes, incomprehensible wordplay from the people who scoff food while wearing a scoff.

I get why Eeyore is banned that. But then, my dad raised me on Gilbert & Sullivan.

Because we don't speak non-rotisserie English!

More shawarma trucks could fix this

😮

I mean I speak British English and I still don't get it

A donkey named hee-haw!

Which reminds me, semi-relevantly, that every time I get to the hee-haws in FM's Midsummer Night's Dream overture, I laugh. I mean, like: Good one, Felix.

Do you know Dohnányi’s Variations on a Nursery Tune?

Oh yes, it's very charming and mirthful!

First time I heard it was at a Prom, which was the only time I have genuinely LOL’d at a classical concert.

Not a lot of really good jokes in classical music.

This is why I stick to G&S

Hmm, on the other hand… en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Scherzo

Tough crowd.

The sheep going astray — with melodic lines that meander and diverge — in Handel’s Messiah is my favorite

I really like Gianni Schicchi because not only is the plot funny, as most comic operas' plots are not, but even the music is funny.

Willie really gave that man a donkey head and went "ok back to the main plot"

A thing among many I like about Midsummer is that it's legitimately hilarious in ways that don't require a degree in Elizabethan studies to appreciate.

The character Bottom’s first name is “Nick” which sounds like a man who inadvertently sat on a razor in the bath.

I mean, "Ninny's Tomb" and "Thisne" alone, come on. That's gold.

Watching modern actors try to make Feste's jokes in Twelfth Night funny is often excruciating.

Though how he got "By my life, this is my lady’s hand! These be her very c’s, her u’s, and her t’s, and thus she makes her great P’s" past the Hays Office, I'll never know.

One has to imagine, or at least I have to imagine, that Will was writing that joke solely for his own amusement, because I can't imagine its making its way across the footlights if you don't already know it.

The Arden edition of the play has a nearly full-page-length footnote on this line. Lots of debate over whether the "and" should be pronounced "N," since both versions mean the same thing. Thus doth the whirligig of scholarship bring in its revenges.

Been there (thrice). The secret feels like a) finding yourself *hilarious* when the other characters do not and b) judicious pruning.

Also lots and lots of illustrative gesturing and pointing at one's own dick, I'd imagine.

I was going to say the same -- in almost every production I've seen, Feste makes his "jokes" fully aware (either smugly or despairingly) that they're NOT funny. "I am indeed not her fool but her corrupter of words."

That island needs an intervention

Really? sincerely?

additional current contemplation: whether a character in musical set at the turn of the twentieth century, even an upstanding member of the proletariat, would hurl the insult "You suck!" [no]

Ragtime?

*taps fingertip to nose* In a song, I should note, that I legitimately find amusing (otherwise).

“…at the teat of capitalism”?

If only.

Thing is when you've managed to work in "at the teat of" the last word doesn't matter , you can put anything there, you've already won

I see that you and @gregpak.net are working together today!

… what musical might this be?

*in a musical set etc. 🙄

Suck eggs, perhaps

I believe “You suck!” was first uttered on stage in 1927 by the Backwoodsmen sitting through Cap’n Andy’s endless recap of The Parson’s Bride.

I used to teach English in Europe and one of the British English resources I had was a domino game matching homophones. Saw/sore messed with my head Every. Single. Time.

The mystery rhyme thing goes both ways, of course. The NYT crossword frequently tortures non-US solvers with homophone wordplay that isn't homophonic for the rest of us. The MARY-MARRY-MERRY merger generates a lot of puzzlement for those of us who missed out on it.

Though not in the Scottish bit of Britain, where the "r" is sounded, and the vowels are different. But by way of compensation: In Glasgow, "sparrow" legitimately rhymes with "father". In Dundee, "ball" rhymes with "snow" rhymes with "jaw". Swings. Roundabouts.

A Glaswegian colleague of mine told me he would pronounce Carl and Carol in exactly the same way

That works. One of the few thinks Glaswegian shares with Scottish Gaelic is a tendency to stuff a schwa between certain pairs of neighbouring consonants. So Carl becomes "Cah-rull".

All these things you saw in your pajamas Are a long-range forecast for your farmers

the crème de la crème of the chess world in a show with everything but Yul Brynner

we could fill a book just with examples of this from Tim Rice.

Oh my god

Also in Rhode Island

They would also legitimately rhyme in a certain near-extinct New York accent as spoken by Clara Bow, Betty Boop, and Bugs Bunny

My mind was blown at 17, when I heard a friend, a Londoner, say: “The water in Mallorca don’t taste like it ought to” and it rhymed perfectly.

" . . . what it oughta." Scans betta.

Was your friend an ad exec? youtu.be/GKRuG4oIu_o?...

Thinking of some of the attempts to rhyme Britishly in My Fair Lady that British actors just do not engage with.

(I think it’s Harrison doing “oohs and aahs” and “who she was” that made me notice.)

you gotta be careful when talking about pawn shops, too

And not just in a musical!