Songwriter's Bane

[billroper]

Did you know that the word "colors" rhymes with absolutely nothing useful?

(In this context, "crullers" is not useful. Perhaps for breakfast...)

Comments

[jcw-da-dmg.livejournal.com]

Dullards? Hullers?

[thnidu.livejournal.com]

I've wondered why so many rhymeless words are color names: orange, purple, turquoise.

[jeff-duntemann.livejournal.com]

Hey, "orange" rhymes with "door hinge." More or less. Approximately. If you say it fast.

[patoadam]

The four eng-
ineers
wore orange
brassieres.

Eating an orange
while making love
guarantees more enj-
oyment thereof.

[patoadam]

Not to mention silver and beige. I've wondered about that too. Might there be a linguistic explanation?

[billroper]

I would rhyme beige with age, wage, and rage myself.

And gauge. And sage.

Stopping now. :)

(Silver, though, remains a problem.)

[patoadam]

I would rhyme beige with the first two letters of Asia, but that isn't the same as age.

[billroper]

Slightly different accents, I suspect.

[lemmozine.livejournal.com]

how 'bout porpoise for turquoise? Or Rolls Royce? Voice?

Roger Miller used "maple surple" for "purple" Being a member of the Denver Employees Retirement Plan, I could use "DERP'll"

Hmmm - getting poetic - watch out:

I'll never wear a shirt that's purple:
I also doubt that Wyatt Earp'll

(so sorry)

[thnidu.livejournal.com]

"how 'bout porpoise for turquoise? Or Rolls Royce? Voice?"

No. No, and no.

turquoise /tə˞ˈkɔ͜ɪz/
porpoise /ˈpɔɹpəs/
Rolls Royce /ˈɹo͜ʊlzˈɹɔ͜ɪs/ ,
voice /ˈvɔ͜ɪs/

[tollermom]

Hmmm... you know, I've never noticed that.

And now my brain is running in little tiny circles putting every beginning it can come up with onto "ullers", 'cause there's gotta be more than just crullers, surely!

I think my brain is desperately in need of sleep.

[catalana.livejournal.com]

"Duller" might be useful; you don't need the S on the end for the purposes of the rhyme.

[catsittingstill.livejournal.com]

yes, you do.

[billroper]

I would use it that way in a pinch, since I'll occasionally make compromises on the rhyming structure if it sounds right.

The really sad thing was that the way the thing ended up being constructed, I would have had to rhyme colors twice.

Thud, thud, thud.

[catalana.livejournal.com]

Matter of taste. In general people worry about matching the vowel sound; everything else is gravy.

[billroper]

And sometimes not even that. I recently rhymed "again", "wind", "spin", and "begin".

(Actually, the rhyme scheme was really AABB, but that was darned close to AAAA in that verse. Obviously the first pair is the one that is cheating, but it has the right sound to it.

And I did not pronounce it "agin". Really. :) )

[billroper]

I'm pretty sure I'm going to end up making use of this one somewhere. Thanks!

(As in, this will even work with the flow. Although it's going to migrate from the now-mutated chorus into the verse...)

[lemmozine.livejournal.com]

hmmm

bowlers, holy rollers, baby strollers, halfers and wholers, molars.

one of the many reasons I like Dave Carter's song By the River, Where She Sleeps is that he came up with a rhyme for orange that isn't forced and actually flows with the song:

"Professor come to burst my bubble, says that girl is bound for trouble
Serves me solace in a paper cup
But it looks a bit like agent orange and when he leaves he slams the door and
Just about that time she phones me up"

Point: try breaking the rhyme into 2 or 3 words instead of one. Like that.

[catalana.livejournal.com]

I gotta say that in the accent Roper has, pretty much none of those possibilities would rhyme with colors.

[billroper]

That was my first thought. :)

[smallship1.livejournal.com]

You did know you were going to get a whole bunch of suggestions from people who don't know what you're writing about, didn't you? :)

Sometimes, you just have to move the word back from the end of the line somehow.

[billroper]

Oh, yeah. But it keeps life entertaining.

The line has now been surgically repaired. I liked it better the way that it was, but the English language didn't much care for it that way. :)

[filkertom.livejournal.com]

Which is why we have the words "hue", "tint", "shade", and "tone"....

[catsittingstill.livejournal.com]

Darn! I was going to suggest those. Except the plurals, since "colors" is plural.

[billroper]

Well, yes, that is something I'm working with... :)

[billroper]

Yup. Not as good for what I want to do, but they'll have to do.

[tceisele.livejournal.com]

I was just thinking about this a while ago: maybe we should start a society to create new words that rhyme with "orange" (and other difficult words). Heck, things are being invented, discovered, or just relabeled all the time, why can't we take advantage of this to see that they get named in a way that will help out our struggling songwriters and poets?

[kizoku42.livejournal.com]

In honor of the vast number of people mulling this over, I propose "mullers".

[billroper]

I'd be more likely to use it with wine, though. :)

[jcw-da-dmg.livejournal.com]

Absolutely nothing useful?
Christmas morning, stuff the goose full.

[catsittingstill.livejournal.com]

Rework the line so that "colors" falls in the middle, and something easier to rhyme falls at the end.

[billroper]

That would normally be a good choice, but it unfortunately eviscerates the mood I'm going for.

[carolf.livejournal.com]

I really think your best recourse is to use a synonym for "colors" and then rhyme *that.*

It's one of the reasons English is such a good language for poetry -- it is so flexible and has such a rich vocabulary, that you can find a word for just about anything in any meter in any rhyme.

As a noun: hues, tints, pigments, dyes, pastels, tincture, tone (depending on the meaning of "color") ...

As a verb: paint, wash, imbue, tint, tinct, wash (again, depending on the meaning of "color."

[billroper]

And that's what I've ended up doing. It's not quite as satisfactory, but has the advantage of actually working. :)

[billroper]

More correctly put, I'd rearrange the line, but it only has four words and two of them have to go together in a particular order, so I'm kind of stuck from that perspective. Thus, it ends up being time to change the offending word. :)

[lemmozine.livejournal.com]

I've always insisted that, conceptually, silver rhymes with orange, because they are are both well-known colors that are hard to find rhymes for. Perhaps another word that rhymes with colors may be something that doesn't seem to rhyme at all, like pumas or rice pudding, perhaps. Nearly everything goes well with rice pudding. The only song I can think of that has a "real" rhyme for pudding is "Sally Goodin."

One thing I've noticed songwriters and poets do is invert the line with the difficult rhyme so the unrhymeable word falls in the middle.

[thnidu.livejournal.com]

If "Sally Goodin" rhymes with "pudding", so does "wooden". And if you'll allow some slop, "wouldn't", "couldn't", and "shouldn't".