On this day (penultimate April) in history, U.S. President Abraham Lincoln’s funeral train arrived in Cleveland OH, following his assassination on 4/14/1865. As described by Tim Evanson on FB today:
Archive for the ‘Poetic form’ Category
Chant for a mailing tube
April 25, 2026Yesterday’s (4/24) Zippy strip has our Pinhead singing the praises of everyday stationery supplies, in particular the cylinders (now usually made of plastic) used to convey rolled-up sheets of material with printing or designs on them: the telescoping plastic mailing tube:
Zippy chants for the TPMT
Four words of decreasing length (in number of syllables), in two phrases:
— the adjectival modifiers telescoping ‘which telescopes’ and plastic ‘which is made of plastic’ (4 + 2 syllables)
— and the head compound noun mailing tube ‘tube for mailing things’ (2 + 1 syllable)
Thereby achieving the effect of building to a final one-syllable bang.
How’s your old wazoo?
April 24, 2026(some vulgar slang, but (I think) tolerable by kids and the sexually modest)
Today’s (4/24) morning name, the final line of a quatrain I learned as boy lore about 1950:
How’s your ma and how’s your pa
And how’s your sister Sue?
And while we’re on the subject,
How’s your old wazoo?
(#1) The family-wazoo rhyme; I didn’t know the quantity adverbial up the wazoo at the time, so I mistakenly took wazoo to be a variant of street slang dick / cock ‘penis’
Reptilian fruit couplet
December 24, 2025Accompanying this hazy snapshot posted on Facebook on 12/22 by John Wells —
Juicy scavenging on the green slopes of (I assume) Montserrat, in the Leeward Islands; the fully ripe fruits fall to the ground and ferment there, where the local iguanas can feed on them
— was his caption, the donée for a poem in trochaic tetrameter (with a couple leading unaccented syllables), the most common meter for folk poetry of all kinds in English:
An iguana feasts on fallen mangoes
The angel of the Lord came down
December 2, 2025… And glory shone all around
So I sang this afternoon, immersed in the joy of the Christmas season, weeping with pleasure at being able to sing again (and exercise my lungs; my singing is supposed to be both pleasurable and therapeutic), after many weeks of being laid low. And so I write about the hymn tune Sherburne paired with the text of the Christmas carol “While shepherds watched their flocks”, from which comes the angel descending in a shimmer of glory.
Not what I intended to post about today — but the Ernie Kovacs Nairobi Trio comic routine has turned out to be vastly more complex than I originally thought, so I’m going for the fire-bright Christmas angel. Stay tuned for something later about three people in gorilla suits.
Maybe it’s a plant thing
July 19, 2025In my 7/14 posting “Making a mango crazy in bed”, a surprising mishearing on my part. The speaker said:
What’s a bedroom move that makes a man go crazy?
But what I heard was:
What’s a bedroom move that makes a mango crazy?
The (sex-infused) mangos just dropped in from the sky, bafflingly, with no justification I could see. (Intended [mæn.go] and perceived [mæŋgo] are very close acoustically, but mango makes no sense in the context. )
Then on the 17th it was kapok. Maybe it’s a plant thing.
hoozamaflazamadoozamajillions 2
April 30, 2025🐅 🐅 🐅 tiger tiger tiger for ultimate April; tomorrow the rabbit operatives of the revitalized Industrial Workers of the World will smash the tiger lackeys serving the corrupt octopus of big business and government; the Wobblies will, of course, dance onto the scene, tossing flowers to the audience (public service warning: do not eat the muguets; they are beautiful and sweet-selling, but toxic)
Previously on this blog. In yesterday’s “hoozamaflazamadoozamajillions 1”, a Lynn Johnston For Better or For Worse strip, (re)published on 6/19/24:
(#1) There are three linguistic things going on in this cartoon: the ambiguity of the verb count; the invented –illions words; and the thing [my correspondent Masayoshi Yamada] was puzzled by, the gigantic “nonsense nonce coinage” (as he put it) hoozamaflazamadoozama modifying jillions
Yesterday, things 1 and 2; today, thing 3.
Morning name: barramundi
March 18, 2025Awakening at 3:51 am (to a performance of Richard Strauss’s comic opera Intermezzo, which has nothing to do with any of what follows, beyond evoking operatic singing), what was in my head was the word barramundi (pronounced boldly, with a big tongue-trilled R in it, so that it was simultaneously ponderous and ridiculous). I immediately recalled why the name of an Asian / Oceanic fish was calling to me: a recent Facebook posting by an American who was startled to find the fish on sale in a supermarket near them.
So: the fish, in the water and on the table. Then the name: metrically, a double trochee, of the back-accented type (Barbarina, ` ˘ ´ ˘ ) rather than the front-accented type (manicurist, ´ ˘ ` ˘ ) — which led me to operatic singing, not Strauss’s Intermezzo, but the marvels of Verdi’s Rigoletto, in particular the duet Si vendetta, whose title is, well, yes, a back-accented double trochee.
A moment of raunchy doggerel
January 31, 2025(dirty verse — a raunchy burlesque of some scurrilous doggerel — so not for kids or the sexually modest)
This is what I wrote to cease my weeping at a moment this morning when a number of MSNBC commenters, who were variously black, Jewish, female, and queer, struggled not to break down in hurt, anger, and despair in reporting on Anaranjado Grabpussy’s apparently declaring a ban on federal celebrations of DEI occasions (Black History Month, Pride, etc.). Further inspired by someone ranting, I don’t know why, on Facebook about Dildo as if it were the name of a person, a character in some social drama.
The axolotl poem
January 6, 20251/6 it’s Epiphany and 2001 Insurrection Day, and there’s fresh news from the salamander hotline, a follow-up to my writing yesterday, in the posting “That’s a lotta axolotl”:
I have known about axolotls since the 1950s, when Mad magazine was responsible for potrzebie as a non sequitur nonsense word, ferschlugginer as a sort of all-purpose modifier of negative affect, … and axolotl as a nonsense reference.
Which elicited this comment from Robert Coren:
As you may not be surprised to learn, my thoughts also went to Mad magazine as soon as I saw the word. I particularly remember fragments of a parody of Wordsworth’s Daffodils …
I omit RC’s recollections, which are indeed fragmentary, after the first two lines (memory is a fickle thing); but the parody / burlesque (which I’d forgotten about) manages to be both clever (maintaining the form of the Wordsworth — 6-line verses of iambic tetrameter, with rhyme pattern ABABCC — and catching its spirit) and crude, just as a Mad parody ought to be.
(Rhymes for axolotl are not plentiful: the Mad parody uses bottle, twice, rejecting glottal, throttle, and wattle, and also AmE waddle, twaddle, toddle, swaddle, coddle, and model.)