My grand-daughter Opal showed up for breakfast this morning wearing a new t-shirt her mother had found for her on the Threadless site:
By Kacie Mills, the shirt has 14 instances of a verse form that I’ll call the Alligator Goodbye, on the model of “see you later, alligator” (at the top of the shirt).
An Alligator Goodbye is a verse form, in trochaic tetrameter, a single line divided in two parts, G (a goodbye, e.g. see you later) and V (a vocative referring to a creature, e.g. alligator); G and V rhyme. The perfect metrical pattern is
S W S W / S W S W
(where S indicates a strongly accented syllable, W a weakly accented syllable, and / the division between G and V. When a half-line has two S’s in it, the stronger of the two is marked by boldfacing: S.)
The form allows for a lot of variation. In particular, a half-line can be missing its final W, as in #2 below. Here’s the whole set, marked up metrically:
1. see you later, alligator: S W S W / S W S W
2. keep it real, spotted seal: S W S / S W S
3. in a few, cockatoo: S W S / S W S (or with accent reversal on cockatoo)
4. adieu, caribou: W S / S W S (iambic reversal in G) [depends on anglicized pronunciation of adieu]
5. take care, black bear: S S / S S
6. bye, bye, fruit fly: S S / S S
7. ciao, brown cow: S / S S (only one S in G)
8. good luck, silly duck: S S / S W S
9. see you soon, big baboon: S W S / S W S
10. another time, porcupine: W S W S / S W S (or with accent reversal on porcupine; note half-rhyme)
11. best wishes, little fishes: S S W /S W S W
12. peace out, river trout: S S / S W S
13. gotta go, buffalo: S W S / S W S (or with accent reversal on buffalo)
14. have a good day, sting ray: S W W S / S S (or with accent reversal on sting ray)
plus the classic response to #1 (not on the t-shirt):
15. in a while, crocodile: S W S / S W S (or with accent reversal on crocodile)
Bonus: another Threadless shirt (by tenso GRAPHICS), on a mathematical theme:
Yes, a Venn diagram. And the intersection of a beaver and a duck is a …?
June 4, 2011 at 10:44 am |
Ah, the old platypus & keytar joke.
June 4, 2011 at 11:31 am |
In Slang: The People’s Poetry (pp. 114-5), Michael Adams talks about the broader class of “rhyming salutations, farewells, and queries.” He notes that “What’s your story, morning glory” is attested back to 1944. He also talks about inventing new rhymes with his wife, like “How’s it goin’, protozoan.”
June 4, 2011 at 2:07 pm |
Nice reference. I know “What’s the story, / Morning glory?” only from Bye, Bye, Birdie, but it was clearly old stuff then.
June 4, 2011 at 11:40 am |
For me, real and seal don’t rhyme. Real instead rhymes with ill (and doesn’t rhyme with eel). (Exception: real estate). Is that unusual? None of the online dictionaries I’ve checked recognize that pronunciation, but I’m pretty sure it’s not just me.
June 4, 2011 at 2:12 pm |
Ah, you have lowering/laxing of /i/ before /l/, well attested, and discussed in the sociophonetic literature. One of the complexities is that for many speakers it seems to be lexeme-specific. Probably real is affected because of its high frequency, and seal spared because of its lower frequency.
Yeah, not just you.
June 5, 2011 at 5:25 am |
From Aric Olnes on Facebook:
June 18, 2011 at 1:20 am |
Didn’t Bobby McFerrin start this?
June 18, 2011 at 5:45 am |
Far from it. See the Wikipedia entry. The phrase was incorporated into a song in the 1950s, made famous by the recording by Bill Haley and the Comets in 1955, released in 1956. (I long ago had a copy of the Rock Around the Clock album with the song on it.) But the catchphrase was current before that.
Bobby McFerrin was born in 1950.
December 4, 2011 at 5:09 pm |
And now on ADS-L from Jon Lighter, 12/4/11:
And a follow-up from Jon: