[Dean's World] Dean: English Is Tough Stuff

[notify at powerblogs.com]

Posted by Dean:
English Is Tough Stuff
http://www.deanesmay.com/posts/1153106307.shtml


   Dearest creature in creation,
   Study English pronunciation.
   I will teach you in my verse
   Sounds like corpse, corps, horse, and worse.
   I will keep you, Suzy, busy,
   Make your head with heat grow dizzy.
   Tear in eye, your dress will tear.
   So shall I! Oh hear my prayer.

   Just compare heart, beard, and heard,
   Dies and diet, lord and word,
   Sword and sward, retain and Britain.
   (Mind the latter, how it's written.)
   Now I surely will not plague you
   With such words as plaque and ague.
   But be careful how you speak:
   Say break and steak, but bleak and streak;
   Cloven, oven, how and low,
   Script, receipt, show, poem, and toe.

   Hear me say, devoid of trickery,
   Daughter, laughter, and Terpsichore,
   Typhoid, measles, topsails, aisles,
   Exiles, similes, and reviles;
   Scholar, vicar, and cigar,
   Solar, mica, war and far;
   One, anemone, Balmoral,
   Kitchen, lichen, laundry, laurel;
   Gertrude, German, wind and mind,
   Scene, Melpomene, mankind.

   Billet does not rhyme with ballet,
   Bouquet, wallet, mallet, chalet.
   Blood and flood are not like food,
   Nor is mould like should and would.
   Viscous, viscount, load and broad,
   Toward, to forward, to reward.
   And your pronunciation's OK
   When you correctly say croquet,
   Rounded, wounded, grieve and sieve,
   Friend and fiend, alive and live.

   The rest of this masterpiece can be read [1]right here. I strongly
   recommend that you try to read the entire thing aloud. I did, and I
   giggled hysterically through most of it.

   (Thanks [2]Kathy.)

References

   1. http://www.frivolity.com/teatime/Songs_and_Poems/english_is_tough_stuff.html
   2. http://site-essential.com/