As my dieting closes in on 11 stone (1 (British) stone = 14 lbs.), I am reminded that my goal, the return to 140 lbs. after nearly a decade away, figured in a cute pun made by Ann Daingerfield Zwicky many years ago, when she quipped that I’d become
a ten-stone cowboy
(playing on the title of the country-pop song “Rhinestone Cowboy”, written by Larry Weiss and famously performed by Glen Campbell).
It’s a distant pun, /tɛn/ for /rajn/, but it works, if you know about the song; otherwise, it’s just mysterious.
(Small phonological note: ten-stone and rhinestone differ prosodically, though both have primary accent on their first syllable and some accent on their second: the second syllable of ten-stone has a heavier accent than the second syllable of rhinestone. There are two schemes for transcribing this difference: either by distinguishing a secondary and a tertiary accent (both distinct from unaccented), 1 2 vs. 1 3; or by transcribing the words as 1 1 vs. 1 2 (positing only one non-primary accent), with the understanding that in 1 1 compound words, the first syllable has a phonetically heavier accent than the second.)
