Rhymes and definitions and confusion

[sniffnoy]

OK... this might not make a lot of sense.

Here's something I don't understand: Why does (or did) it seem that so many people have the wrong definition of rhyme?

OK - it's been quite a while since I've actually observed this pattern, but I have a memory of having used to noticed this a lot, and I'm going to assume that's reliable. Though perhaps the sample was very non-representative; maybe I'm only remembering this from, say, high school, and it's only really younger people who significantly get this wrong.

I mean, yes, it seems people are rarely actually taught the correct definition. (I'm not certain I ever heard a correct definition till I was in high school, and I certainly didn't manage to come up with it myself.) But I don't just mean people will state the definition wrong when asked, or make easily false statements like "rhyme has nothing to do with meter", I mean they will actually classify rhymes things that are not. This really goes against what I expect of people, i.e., that regardless of what they say, they will typically rely on their native pattern-matching abilities when it comes to actually judging category membership.

Now maybe lots of people don't realize the definition they've been given is wrong, because they haven't yet learned that a definition can be wrong. But these are people who not only don't realize the definition is wrong but are actually using it, in what would be, I expect, contradiction to what their native pattern-matching ability should be telling them.

Hypotheses:
1. These people are just "nerds" in the sense Michael Vassar uses the word. Going by my memory, this seems... unlikely. In particular I think I'm rather higher up on that scale than most random people I might meet...
2. They can't really natively recognize the "rhyme" pattern at all; they only know it via definition. I'm going to have a hard time believing that one, too.
3. I'm perceiving a pattern where there is none. Really, Harry? People not being able to determine what is and is not a rhyme? Everyone knows what a rhyme is. My memory is probably faulty. This is looking like my best hypothesis so far.
4. Goddammit I have no goddamn clue.

So... what the hell?

Maybe this would be more helpful had I written this, you know, years ago, when I still actually noticed this, rather than now when I don't think I've actually seen an instance of this in a long time.

-Harry

Comments

[hapaxnym.livejournal.com]

Not sure what you mean by "wrong definition of rhyme"; rhyme does involve meter in the strictest sense (e.g., "tricky" doesn't strictly rhyme with "picquet"), but English word rhythms being what they are, it takes some effort to think of words with identical sounds but different stress patterns.

Or are you rejecting slant rhymes and assonance from "rhyme"? I think that maybe correct in the strict technical sense, but makes poor sense from a poetical point of view.

Or am I missing something?

[sniffnoy.livejournal.com]

Ahhh right I forgot to actually specify what I was thinking of! >_< Let me take a moment to do that.

The actual thing I'm thinking of (or *was* thinking of, since this whole entry is a stored thought) is people claiming rhymes when the matching parts are unstressed / entirely too late, or don't even have matching stress. E.g. claiming something like "electric / fantastic", because they both end in "ic"; or worse yet, something like "bicycle" / "sickle" - which might be confused for a match if you only thought to check the definition one way, but...

Or are you rejecting slant rhymes and assonance from "rhyme"? I think that maybe correct in the strict technical sense, but makes poor sense from a poetical point of view.

I guess that's hypothesis number 4 - whoever it was I was thinking of had generalized "rhyme" as you suggest. What little memory I have of this suggests the context rules that out, but that's probably very unreliable. (I'd say justifying it with "no, it rhymes because [incorrect definition]" rules that out, as they'd just stated how they were generalizing it and it wasn't that, but as I said above I don't expect people to correctly report the definitions they're actually using so that doesn't count for much. A better way to rule it out might be my recall that - subjectively, anyway - a lot of these just sounded terrible...) So it's possible they just needed to be more precise in their speech, because that's often the problem. :P

[joshuazelinsky.livejournal.com]

The stress issue is I think generally ignored because most "rhymes" people encounter today are in songs where playing with the stress as the beat dictates seems to be more ok.