“Often added merely for rhyme’s sake”
Posted: April 3, 2015 Filed under: process | Tags: anagrams, cinnamon, constraints, definitions, dictionaries, hie, my honey, oed, rhyme, Webster's Leave a commentWebster’s Collegiate has long been the dictionary of record for the endearments. But today I’ve decided to admit the OED, at least in some cases.
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It was my honey that tipped me over into those honeyed waters: I wanted hy to be a word, because that would allow omen : omen hy y. Webster’s had no entry for it, but the dear old OED offers up the obsolete hie | hy. This seems to me legitimate. The OED has already suggested an obsolete endearment, cinnamon, which yielded a poem. (For contrast, see the Scrabble dictionary, which includes words only for the sake of having more of them, and which, as I’ve mentioned before, I will never use, much as I never order from Amazon. It’s a matter of principle.)
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† hie | hy, n.
Obs.
Haste, speed. Chiefly in phr. in hie, in haste, with haste, quickly, soon: often added merely for rhyme’s sake.
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O, what I would do for rhyme’s sake, which is far from mere.
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I also wanted ny to be a word, which would allow home. The best the OED offers is the proper N.Y., and I am far from abandoning all constraints, and the proper-noun one still feels useful. So, alas, no home for my honey.
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Although there is talk in my household of investing in the full twenty-volume OED (plus the three-volume additions series), for now I use the online version. It’s one of the principle benefits of university affiliation, access to all those words.
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Webster’s, lest you worry, I will always begin with you.
Sugar plum
Posted: March 11, 2011 Filed under: process, the words | Tags: a, constraints, i, made-up words, sugar plum, u, vowels, Webster's, words Leave a commentAny one of these endearments that has the letter u in it, I said to A recently, is gonna be kind of dirty. And this is true. The letter u ends up in lots of words that can cause a sweet little poem to take a piratical turn. Or sinister, maybe, or just gloomy. In the case of sugar plum, for instance, pus, glum, slump.
And then there’s surl, the only semi-made-up word I have allowed myself to use thus far. It came up in the anagram surl gap um, if I am remembering correctly, or maybe it was surl map ug (is ug a word? I can’t remember. But it sure is in the pirate camp).
In my mind, it was a short hop from surly to surl, which seemed like a more accurate way to say surliness. More like stuff, like a substance, than a quality. And this seemed useful. My Webster’s Collegiate does not have an entry for it. I had never had occasion to look up surly before, though, and this was surprising: its root is sir, as in sirly. Oh, that old i/u connection, so weird, so counterintuitive—except when we think of certain words. Which brings us back to dirty—it’s that u quality that makes it work so well as a word, and I think it’s why dirty came to my mind to describe the aspect a u can lend to an endearment. Lucky sugar plum also has an a in it to brighten it up, to open it.
Also: my mother used to call me “sugar plum.”
