Arnold Zwicky's Blog

Briefly noted: today’s Zippy strip has our Pinhead rowing to a half-rhyme:

Zippy is keen on spleen (‘bad temper; spite’ (NOAD)) and is happy to vent his in a half-rhyme. In particular, the feature rhyme of /strim/ with /splin/, m – n being the most common feature rhyme for consonants in English. On a lake, he could have displayed his hate (k – t).

This entry was posted on May 14, 2026 at 11:18 am and is filed under Language play, Linguistics in the comics, Rhyme. You can follow any responses to this entry through the RSS 2.0 feed. You can leave a response, or trackback from your own site.