Monosyllables

[Benny Bunter]

Pipe

 

[Benny Bunter]

Words, especially these monosyllabic ones, are so weird when you take them out of their context and say them out loud over and over until they become detached from their meaning

 

[0bleak]

serious question for the poets even if it doesn't seem like it:
do people ever think in terms of things like woody versus tinny

thinking about rhythmic meter and playing drums, hi-hats and cymbals would obviously be the tinny sounds, snare could go either way depending on the make of the snare and its dimensions and how it's tuned, and while the bass/kick drum and toms would be the "woody"

so you'd often have AT LEAST two tinny sounds (meaning played twice as fast or often, most commonly on the hi-hat or ride cymbal) to one woody sound (most commonly the bass/kick drum)

 

[0bleak]

I imagine there must be some interesting stuff deep in the bowels of Discogs where we get to eschewing words for phonetics:

https://www.discogs.com/style/sound+poetry?srsltid=AfmBOopqnXcie5Q_LBg1oQQRTlYpw6g8TXOEXSJZiCA6VCgLHuOt_0m-

 

[sus]

Pipe

Pot, weed, herb, trees, smoke, chief, vape, hit, bong, jay, joint, spliff, cig, fag

 

[0bleak]

 

[sus]

The linguist George Kingsley Zipf made a now classic observation about the relationship between a word's length and its frequency; the more frequent a word is, the shorter it tends to be. He claimed that this “Law of Abbreviation” is a universal structural property of language.

 

[sus]

Given spoken language came first it seems like syllables are really the measure of length

 

[sus]

Profanity always monosyllable (and famously four lettered)

 

[sus]

All the common ancient nouns and verbs

Cow goat sheep horse oat bread grass tree fence hill field wheel plank wood meat

And

Run jump walk sit stand talk buy sell ride sleep wake eat drink

 

[sus]

Pound connection to the lengthier Latinate vs shorter AngloSaxon

 

[0bleak]

makes sense for babies, too

 

[Benny Bunter]

Some interesting stuff in that Owen Barfield book I've got about this, I'll type some of it out when I get the time

 

[Benny Bunter]

Profanity always monosyllable (and famously four lettered)

Onomatopoeia tends to be one syllable too

Bang boom quack splash zip slap

 

[sus]

Caw bark purr hiss creak hum roar

 

[sus]

And if they're multisyllabic they're often doubled/repetitious.

Ruff-ruff. Cacaw. Haha. Bow-wow.

Most bird names have onomatopoeic origins. Pigeon from pipire, peep, pio pio pi. Heron from IE "root imitative of its cry (compare Old Church Slavonic kriku)."

 

[0bleak]

are ya'll flirting with me?

 

[Murphy]

cog, dog, fog, gog, hog, zog @vimothy , log, cod, god, mod, Todd

why am i doing this

 

[Murphy]

it’s like a neuropsychiatric function test meets Under Milk Wood with all its bric-à-brac, In Parenthesis too and its relentless He for the Germans

 

[Murphy]

Accents mutate the soft stress

This is productive for a 29 hour shift