Making Up Words

The Simpsons references lurk everywhere. Even when there's no actual reference to the show. It is a defining cultural touchstone of our age!

I was struck by this realization while reading my undergraduate alumni publication, Bates Magazine. There's a story in the latest issue about the remodeling of some buildings that, during my time there (ah, the good old days!) were dorms. One of them was my dorm. It was the best, because it was right in the middle of campus, convenient to the library, the dining hall, post office, and bookstore, and the buildings where I had classes.

But again, those days are gone. Anyway, the article notes that the buildings are now larger, "with additions that embiggen floor space by about a third in Hedge, and about a quarter in the Bill."

Now Wikipedia informs us that The Simpsons did not actually invent this word, which apparently was previously used at least once in 1884, but the show certainly popularized it.

You actually see it in many places these days, and I for one welcome our new animated language overlords.

Learnin' Stuff

I was at the 40th anniversary party/slash 9th edition book launch for Our Bodies, Ourselves, yesterday. There were a lot of amazing women from all over the world who spoke about their work in women's health as global partners of OBOS.

I was knitting an afghan square, not taking notes, and the event was streamed and will be archived, so I won't say much even though there were many cool moments I could highlight.

One thing that did strike me, and then made me wonder at how striking it was, was Miho Ogino, who edited the Japanese edition of Our Bodies, Ourselves (published in 1988 and now out of print, she said, but not before inspiring many other women's health books), mentioning that, unlike in many countries, there was no religious backlash to the book's content in Japan.

She said this was because Japanese society is not strongly religious, and did mention that there was some cultural resistance, as of course there may be anywhere.

"Imagine no religious backlash!" I thought.

And then I thought how unfortunate it is that the default assumption is that religious figures would naturally object to frank information about women's health and sexuality. Can't have people knowing stuff about stuff.

Speaking of frankness, another recurring theme was how tough it is in some languages and societies to even find words for some of these topics. There might literally not be a word for something, or the one commonly used might be inherently associated with shame or secrecy--obviously not what you're going for when you're trying to present facts about health.

Anyway, a very interesting day.

My Character Witnesses

Although I sometimes pretend to grouchiness and ill humor, I think I should let everyone know that I am actually very sweet. Delectable, even.

I have this on good authority, which authority being the number of mosquito bites I always manage to accumulate after an outdoor party.

This evening, I got mosquito bites through my jeans. That's just how luscious I am. Parasitic insects find me irresistible. So if you've ever thought me appealing in any way, you're in good company.

As an aside which is almost certain to take up most of this post, why is it "irresist-ible"? Usually things that can be done or not done are spelled with an "-able." As in, I was unable to manage that thing, or think that thought, or whatever.

Internet? Help me out here.

OK, the Online Etymology Dictionary says that the derivation is "from L.L. irresistibilis, from assimilated form of in- "not, opposite of" ... + resistere".

So it's not actually based on being able to resist something, it's based on a separate word meaning not resistibilis (presumably this does mean, more or less, "resist-able") which was spelled with an 'i'. All right, then.

That conveniently also explains why it's 'ir-' resistible instead of 'un-' resistible, which would be the expected pattern based on things you can't manage or think or so forth.

Thanks, internet!

Wordly Musings

Some things stick with you.

Like, I haven't read (or had read to me) Winnie-the-Pooh since I was about, I don't know, 30 years younger than I am now.

It was never my super favorite set of stories anyway. I preferred Kipling's Just-So Stories.

But for some reason I have long remembered this bit from that one story where Pooh eats too much honey and gets stuck in the tunnel trying to get out of Rabbit's house:

"I thought at the time," said Rabbit, "but I didn't want to say anything,"said Rabbit, "that one of us was eating too much," said Rabbit, "and I knew it wasn't me," he said.

OK, that was me writing it down from memory. Thanks to the wonders of books that have gone out of copyright, I shall find an online version and check my work, which we may do here here in Chapter 2.

And I got it pretty close to right, except it's "only I didn't like to say anything," instead of "but I didn't like to say anything" (which I might have known, since it's more English) and the original does not italicize "me."

Also, this version renders the line as "one of us has eating too much," but that doesn't really make sense even as an old-fashioned Britishism, so I'm going to assume it's a typo.

The point is, I kind of love this. I love the way the language keeps looping back with the "said Rabbit," catching the sort of jumpy way he's talking, and the way it finally wraps up by switching to a decisive "he said."

It's stuck in my head for years and years, I suppose because I always kind of liked it, and only now it occurs to me to remember it again and think about why I liked it.

I'm only slightly likely to go re-read the whole book to better appreciate any other bits of fun prose, but I guess I'll always have that nearly-accurate memory of that one deliciously choppy line. I mean, unless I forget it.


On a slightly related topic, I also see here in Chapter 2 a use of quotation marks that you do see in older books, where they put quotes around the idea of what a character is saying, rather than using them to signify the exact words used.

For example, here in chapter 2 of Winnie-the-Pooh we have Pooh asking if there's any more to eat, followed by the line,

Rabbit took the covers off the dishes, and said, "No, there wasn't."

It doesn't actually make sense that he would say "no, there wasn't"--wasn't is past tense, as is the story as a whole, but the question "is there any more?" is present tense, so the answer really ought to match. We would expect Rabbit to say "no, there isn't" instead.

So today we would either leave the quotation marks out of that line and just write,

Rabbit took the covers off the dishes, and said, No, there wasn't.

Or we'd match the tense to that of the question and write,

Rabbit took the covers off the dishes, and said, "No, there isn't."

I just finished Jane Eyre (no, I had never read Jane Eyre before, yes, as a former English major my head was perpetually hanging in shame), and that book is bristling with this kind of "quotes around the general idea of what the person said" usage. (Hmm...what kind of usage were those quotes just there? Never mind that now.)

And either way we know what's going on, so it's really not a concern for readability, but these days we tend to assume that quotes are for setting off the precise words used by a speaking character, or an exact quote from another text.

These are the words that were used! I was taking notes!

I think it's interesting that there was a time when quotation marks apparently had a more general purpose, signaling that a character said something, and this was the main gist of it, but the author isn't going to worry about exactly transcribing the dialogue.

This was basically the information someone wanted to convey, but I wasn't taking notes, so don't expect a script!

It would be a good way to get around writing differentiated character 'voices,' not that I'm saying that's what Milne or Brontë was doing.

Also, if you don't want to write dialect or accents but they would make sense for your story? This could totally save you!

I'm going to remember this when I start working on a story full of dialects and accents for NaNoWriMo.

I Can Keep Silent No Longer

Speaking of health, and words, and games, all of which I have spoken of at various points in the past, I have a minor gripe with the term used for healing medication in the video game Dragon Age.

It has long troubled me, and now, after months of brooding, I can no longer keep my uneasiness to myself.

See, they call their main healing effect a "poultice," and a poultice is a sort of salve or mush that you smear on yourself. This is well and good, but their visual for the use of a "poultice" is that of a character raising a vial to the mouth and drinking.

This suggests that what they actually have is a healing "potion." A potion, as you may know, is a liquid, commonly consumed by drinking. It's a perfectly good word for a classic magical healing concept.

Poultice, on the other hand, is a perfectly good word for a less-commonly-used healing concept. If you want to give some love to a less-common word, I'm all for it, but be aware of what it actually means.

And if you mean people to be using a potion, just call it a potion. There's nothing wrong with potions.

That is all.

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Important News

PubMed New and Noteworthy informs us that there is now a CSV option under the 'send to' menu so you can save your results in comma-separated value form!

The better to make handy-dandy spreadsheets with! I may faint with enthusiasm.

In other news, Kate Harding made this nifty Wordle document with the top 50 novels 200 people told her she should read if she were going to read an English-language novel. It's a cool visual.

Many people seem to think highly of Middlemarch. Pride and Prejudice, Frankenstein, and Jane Eyre are also popular choices. People like the classics.

Word clouds are just kind of a fun idea, aren't they? You couldn't look around without stubbing your eye on one for a while, although I never think to do anything with them myself, but they often present information in an interesting way.

Certainly it's a lot more eye-catching than a simple list of the 50 titles.

That's it, my next report on something is going to include a word cloud.

"And these are all the journals we've added to the catalog in the past month."

Sadly, it turns out the effect is much less impressive when every piece of information in the cloud is the same size.

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Words

What About Our Daughters has an "annual Martin Luther King overlooked YouTube video post," which is this little meditation on the word 'maladjusted.'





King talks about how this is (or was at the time) one of the most commonly used terms in psychology, but how being 'maladjusted' to an unjust society is the right way to be.

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Taking Up Space

Fierce argument rages (OK, more like 'some disagreement exists') over the issue of spacing. When typing, do you put one space after a period, or two?

The excitement began with a post on Slate by Farhad Manjoo, stating that one space is correct.

The explanation he provides, which I was interested to know, is that the two-space rule comes from the days of typewriters, when every letter was allotted the same amount of room on the page. This meant that M basically filled up that allotted space, while I was surrounded by white page.

Given that all text was filled with such visual gaps around certain letters, it made sense to leave an extra space between sentences, to make sure that the reader's eye registered the change. Now, when we have fonts wherein each letter takes up only as much room as it actually needs, the argument is that one space between sentences is plenty.

Sounds good to me.

I was going to think that it was just some quirky character trait in myself to be oddly fascinated by this topic, but a couple of responses--vehement disagreement from Talulah at Life Under a Rock, and a statement of conversion from Erich Vieth at Dangerous Intersection--demonstrate that I am not alone.

Also, that type-spacing is capable of rousing great passion.

I personally learned to type with the two-space rule, but I worked in the public relations office in college, and was informed that one space was proper for the little press releases we were writing. I got in the one-space habit from there, and never looked back.

I am not, however, particularly concerned about the spacing habits of others. I can't say I've ever really noticed, except in the case of one person I knew who used to throw in three or four spaces between sentences. That caught my eye.

But if you use one or two, it's not going to get my attention. I have my text and language quibbles that I always notice and that send me into fits of incoherent muttering about crimes against communication, but that isn't one of them.

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Just Do Whatever

I was thinking about the phrase "give free rein" lately. I see a lot of people write it as "give free reign."

And I can kind of see how they might both work.

Because a rein is of course the long strap of a bridle, which one uses to guide a horse. You tug on a rein to indicate that the horse should go left or right, or you give the horse free rein and don't provide any guidance, just let it go where it wants.

And reign is of course what a monarch does ("Elizabeth reigns here") or else the rule of a specific monarch ("this all occurred during Elizabeth's reign"). And I really don't think this is what the phrase started out to be, but you could see how giving "free reign" might mean giving someone the rule of something, so it sort of makes sense in the context in which people use it.

I learned it as "free rein" and that's how I personally would write it if I were going to use it, but there's a logic to the other way too.

If we wanted to get sophisticated about it, we could use both of them, but convey slightly different things with each.

I think of 'free rein' (with its sense of no guidance) as being given the ability to go wherever/do whatever you want, while 'free reign' (with its sense of ruling over something) suggests that you're given the ability to make other people do what you want.

If I have free rein of the castle, it means I can go anywhere I want inside the castle walls. If I have free reign of the castle, it means I can boss everyone inside the castle walls around.

At least, that's how I'm going to read it.

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Word Peeve of the Day

I aim to be chill about language. It's an ever-evolving thing, you know? Be cool! Creative usage is how we grow!

But when there are two words that mean completely different things, I do like professionally published books to use the one that makes the most sense, assuming that the 'wrong' one isn't being used on purpose for literary effect.

I read The Passage recently, and I have a note for Justin Cronin's copy editor: 'retched' is vomiting or gagging or possibly dry heaving. Pronounced more or less like 'recht,' where 'ch' is soft like in 'cheese.'

Verb. Past tense of 'retch.' It's an excellent word, and I recommend it.

But if you mean pitiful, sad, bedraggled, miserable, or the like, you want 'wretched.' Pronounced more or less like 'rech-ed.' Two syllables.

Adjective. Also an excellent word, and I heartily recommend it.

I should know, right? I named my blog with it.

I swear I saw 'retched' about three times in this book in contexts where it made no sense at all, but where 'wretched' would have worked. It was weird. People looked 'retched' and so forth. Wait, someone looked 'vomited'?

Now if it was in the context of "Look what the cat retched up!" that would have been fine, but no, it seemed pretty much as if it meant 'wretched.'

And I completely understand that in the day-to-day world not everyone has a blog named after the contents of Gollum's lair, or has a dictionary right to hand, or wants to slow the rush of their thoughts to figure out which of two near-homonyms is the right one for the job.

Grammatical mistakes occur. If it happens on someone's blog or something, I'm not going to sneer and point and make fun of the fact that not everyone is as well-informed as I am about the fine points of vomiting versus being in a deplorable state.

I mean, I will, but I'll do it quietly, to myself.

After all, I'm sure I've made my fair share of glaring grammatical errors over the years, and I'll thank you to snicker quietly into your sleeve about them rather than making a big public fuss.

But if you're going to go getting published, I kind of assume that someone with a dictionary will review your work, and make sure all the words mean something that makes sense. As much as sense-making is part of your artistic vision, of course.

So it just seemed odd, in a large, much-hullaballooed novel from a major publisher, to have this strange mix-up. I'm not completely ruling out the possibility that Justin Cronin did it on purpose for literary effect, but if so, I have to say that effect is quite lost on me.

I suppose I also had some thoughts about the novel itself, but seriously, this word issue drives them all out of my head. Yeah, I read it, it had vampires, whatever. But did you get a load of the freakishly inapt use of 'retched' in there? Dude!

All right, I'm done for the night.
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What Are You Talking About?

Very interesting post by Danah Boyd at Apophenia, about how the current wave of official concern over bullying, while an important topic, is likely to be completely missing the teenagers it tries to reach because they just don't see what goes on in their lives as "bullying," even if, by the standards of the adults talking about this topic, it is.

It's an example of how much language actually does matter.

If I say "don't vorgel," and you don't know that what I mean by that is "put extraneous indicators in your MARC subfields," then you're probably going to keep right on vorgeling if you were doing it before.

Especially if you have your own definition of vorgel, which is "wait outside someone's office door and say 'boo!' when they come out."

Because then you think, well, there's no way I would ever vorgel--it's childish and not very amusing, and because I don't do it or know anyone who does it, this person's extensive "Don't Vorgel" media campaign is completely irrelevant to me!

Um...OK, so that creative example is a little goofy. I blame my frenzied NaNoWriMo writing, which is siphoning off all my slightly more well-developed ideas.

But the point is, if two groups are really not talking about the same thing, it's going to be pretty hard to get any kind of understanding about what needs to be done, or how to do it.

And for heaven's sake, people: don't vorgel.

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Advertising Horror of the Day

I just saw a reprehensible TV commercial for the Dodge Charger.

First, the usual blah blah chatter about how awesome and manly this car is (during a football game, every single thing advertised will be bristling with aggressive manliness, which is eye-rollingly tiresome but too commonplace to stir me from my reading).

Then, the money quote:

"It's not just American craftsmanship. It's an American craft manship."

Gag.

Seriously, Dodge? That's a really terrible pun. Also, it's stupid.

The commercial goes on to make much of the newly-invented term 'manship,' summoning, I suppose, both the concept of a seafaring vessel that is bold, masculine, square-jawed and rippling with taut muscles, and the use of '-ship' tacked onto a word to indicate a quality.

Like, you know, 'leadership,' refers to a quality of 'being a leader,' so 'manship' apparently refers to a quality of 'being a man.' A man with a bold and masculine seafaring vessel at his command. The master of his fate, and the captain of his soul!

The kind of man who's man enough to go buy a car, because it takes some real manliness to do that, as evidenced by the paucity of automotive vehicles on the roads these days.

Sometimes in the old days we might have used the word 'manhood,' but '-hood' doesn't have anything to do with 'craftsmanship,' so clearly a new word had to be made up.

I'm not at all opposed to making up words, but I am opposed to making up words specifically so you can make terrible puns with them.

Shut up and get off my television screen, Dodge. Your feeble wordcraftery disgusts me.

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How Now, Good People?

I was fortunate to have the culturally improving experience of some free Shakespeare on the Common last night (a performance of Othello), and I came away with the bright idea that it would be fun to re-popularize the use of the phrase "how now?"

They use it a lot in Shakespeare plays, and I imagine it as equivalent to the "how are you?" of today, or more casually the "what's up?"

What's going on? What's happening? How's everything?

How now, dude?

It's short and sweet, it has a classical pedigree, and it rhymes. "How now" is the check-in phrase of the future, I can feel it.

It's not just for brown cows anymore.

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Weirdo Spelling

I have recently become aware of a totally new standard by which we can sort humanity into worthy citizens vs. scum of the earth: how you spell that word that means "having a difficult choice to make."

I have always seen it as "dilemma," which your average dictionary prefers, but apparently there are a large number of otherwise well-educated people who spell this word with a silent n: "dilemna."

I had never heard of this before Paul Levy mentioned it at Running a Hospital, and frankly I don't think I hold with it, but based on this update, it's actually fairly common. As an intrepid investigator reports after Googling the variant spelling,

DILEMNA is known all over the English speaking world, from America to Australia, and no one has an idea where it originated.

Weird.

But as I said, this will be a handy tool with which to make snap judgements about people: ask them to spell 'dilemma.'

I haven't yet decided exactly what judgments I'll be making, but rest assured there will be some.

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[Shudder]

Aunt B. at Tiny Cat Pants is musing on the idea that when you get that sudden chill down your spine, it's because someone walked over your grave.

Where did this phrase even come from? Is it a cool notion of a sharp, backwards tug of time that present me can feel something that will happen long after I am dead? Or is it more the idea that there is a patch of land already destined for me, that it and I are tied together even now, without me knowing it, its purpose already plotted–that it will hold my dead corpse–and when someone walks across it, I know it because of that tie?

I like this phrase too, and I always kind of imagined it to have the second meaning, that somewhere out there is a patch of ground that's going to be my grave, and when someone walks across it, it reverberates back to me...spooky.

Of course, I actually think I'd prefer to be cremated and scattered in the woods or something, but "someone walked over one of the miles of ground on which fragments of my strewn ashes will eventually lie" doesn't have the same ring, does it?

There's something about a grave.

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Early Science

I like Bad Science's discussion of the biblical verses of Daniel 1.8, which the post notes offers "a description of the first ever clinical trial."

I am too full and sleepy to say anything else. Happy Holidays, all.

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Questioning Trucks

I'm oddly puzzled by that new Dodge Ram commercial, where a sort of stoic (possibly grizzled), old-fashioned-manly-type voice says "My name is Ram," and introduces himself, as this description explains:

After intoning, "My name is Ram, and my tank is full," the commercial keeps going (and going, and going) with stuff like "I am fueled by optimism, driven by passion and stopped by nothing," and "I am built to reward the doers who climb behind my wheel every day by working even harder than they do."

Then at the end it repeats "my name is Ram, and my tank is full," which sounds a little like something you shouldn't really promise in an ad, unless Dodge has actually perfected an endlessly self-refilling gas tank (which would certainly be something worth advertising).

I mean, I guess maybe it comes with a tank of gas, and all the ad is speaking for is the brand new model moments before you drive it away, but this phrase also raises questions for me about the extent to which the Natural State of an automobile could be considered to be 'possessed of a full tank.' I don't quite buy that this is one of the inherent qualities of a truck.

I would say that an inherent quality might be 'possessed of a gas tank which must have some gas in it in order for the truck to run.' That makes sense. But if you're going to claim that the vehicle's Natural State is full-tank, then does your truck become less Rammy if you happen to let it run down, in the course of a hard day's work? (During which you will not, however, be working as hard as your truck is. 'Cause that's how this truck rolls. On wheels.)

"I was driving a Dodge Ram, but I ran out of gas, so now it's just a hunk of worthless metal. Better get a new truck!"

The tone of the ad kind of reminds me of those Levis commercials that use Walt Whitman poems, with the flat, matter-of-fact-ish reading and the man's voice, so I also start to think "does this truck claim the soul of an unconventional poet, on top of all his other fine qualities?"

I'm inclined to look a little askance at this Ram character, to be honest. Just not quite seeing how all these pieces fit together.

Not quite sure, I guess, what advantages this automobile has over, say, a train, which I could also afford.

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Letters Aloud

For some reason I was thinking this afternoon about the way that it absolutely did not compute, when I was younger, that in some places the letter Z is pronounced 'zed.'

I grew up pronouncing it 'zee,' and then we spent some time in Canada, and it just made no sense. How can you call it something besides 'zee'? That's its name! You can't just change the names of things!

I was aware that people spoke different languages, and sometimes had different accents even when speaking the same language, but for some reason the names of letters were non-negotiable.

That thing is a 'zee,' damn it, that's part of its essential nature, and I will brook no opposition. I mean, I will concede that in Nova Scotia people call it 'zed' for some unfathomable reason, but they're wrong.

Not necessarily wrong in a malicious way, you know, just horribly, horribly mistaken.

It made me think about how we attribute characteristics to things, and can come out of habit to see these characteristics as immutable, even if they actually look quite different from another angle.

Yeah, there really wasn't a moral there, I was just musing.

I would like to note that I've matured somewhat since then (getting older than nine will do that for you), and I currently have no objection to alternate pronunciations of the letter Z. Call it what you will, good people. The important thing is that we all use it to spell 'zebra.'

Now if you want to introduce an alternate spelling of zebra?--oh, you're wrong.

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Follow Tips, Write Good

Stephen's Lighthouse points out this edifying post about 50 Writing Errors that Continue to Haunt Bloggers.

It is getting close to Halloween, so I figure some haunting is due. The list covers various commonly mistaken homonyms and the like (Conscience or Conscious, very different things), but doesn't say anything about zillion-word posts on verse structure, so I think I'm OK there.

I see that eminent/immanent/imminent, one of my favorite homonym confusers, did not make the list. I guess not enough people need to write about well-regarded inherent qualities that are about to happen.

I'm sure I've made my share of writing errors (there are certain words I just can't seem to remember how to spell), but I can't be bothered to go back and hunt them up.

I'm too busy reading other peoples' blogs! I just realized that I was so busy catching up on the 236 unread posts I had this evening, that I completely forgot to watch Dollhouse. It will be my fault if it's cancelled, right?

At least we have Hulu.

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Pressing Poetry Health Issue

I have a low Doggerel Threshold.

I recently received an invitation to a baby shower. Well and good. Accompanying it was a little card with this bit of verse (I find it also on various shower/party planning websites, but no specific author is credited):

To add a little extra glee
And help the parents-to-be,
Please bring a little extra
     From the heart.
An unwrapped pack of diapers,
     To give them a good start!

And I say...um...OK.

Leaving aside the important question of whether diapers, while necessary, are likely to fill expectant parents with 'glee,' or really be a gift I'd consider 'from the heart,' it must be plainly evident that this is dreadful verse.

I know, it's very hard to actually write good verse. I'm not saying I could do better. (It's easy to criticize. Fun, too.)

But good people, please.

There's no way this scans. It is painful to the mind's ear to try to recite it. It has leaped over my low Doggerel Threshold and into my Verse Hatred Lobby.

See, you can't just throw rhymes at the end of lines and call it a day. Each line needs to have a basic rhythm. In simple verse like this, each line should basically have the same number of syllables, with the accent in the same places in each line.

Nursery rhymes are fantastic examples of this--and very appropriate for a baby shower, too! ("Baa baa black sheep, have you any wool? We need some quickly, baby's diaper's full!")

You don't necessarily have to get obsessed with the meter and the different types of foot (although I certainly recommend it because it's wildly interesting), but you have to be able to say it out loud without having to think about it.

That's my basic level of acceptability for short greeting card/invitation verse. If I have to consider where to put the accents, and whether it might work if I run some words together, it's just no good.

Take "To add a little extra glee/And help the parents-to-be." The first line has eight syllables, and the second has seven. Already not a good sign.

The accents in the lines are off too: the first works OK as iambic quadrameter* ("to add/a lit/tle ex/tra glee"), but the second doesn't because it gets all messed up on 'parents-to-be' ("and help/the pa/rents-to-be"?).

You can try the first as an anapestic line with a missing final syllable ("to add a/lit-tle ex/tra glee"), but that doesn't come out well in the next line either (and help the/par-ents-to/-be"). There's a basic problem, which is that the two lines do not have the same rhythm.

Your lines must have the same rhythm, unless you are doing it on purpose or writing free verse, which is most likely not the case here.

Let's see how this might work a little better:

To add a little extra glee
And help the happy 'rents-to-be

I'm not claiming this is now good verse (oh my no), but at least these lines scan: you can read them both with the same rhythm. Each syllable in the first line matches up with one in the second line.

See?

To add a lit- tle ex- tra glee
And help the hap- py 'rents- to- be

And when the rhythm matches up like this, you really don't even have to worry about what kind of foot it is or where to stress the syllables, because it just comes out that way. (Unless I am badly miscalculating the way most people pronounce these words, which is possible.)

Now you will note that this version relies on another horrible feature of bad verse (in addition to the bad meter I have been raving about), which is the weird abbreviation of a word in order to make it fit the rhythm of the line.

In this case I think it's OK, because "'rents" is a kind of college-ism that might fit amusingly in the context of young people who are soon to be parents themselves but who not long ago were using this kind of language. If your parents-to-be are stolid, literal-minded folk in their late forties, perhaps not.

Anyway, can I continue ranting? Of course I can, it's my blog.

So the third line is actually OK as it is, because two rhyming lines, followed by an unrhymed third line, possibly with a different rhythm, is a very common verse structure.

We could say with no problem:

To add a little extra glee

And help the happy 'rents-to-be

Please bring a little extra from the heart

I'm making the third into one longer line instead of breaking it up--I think it might have only been that way because of the size of the piece of paper, and it flows better in one.

Now for the last line/s, which again present a serious scansion issue. As I said, two rhyming lines followed by [something] is a very common structure for verse, but I cannot emphasize enough that what follows must also have poetic rhythm. (Again, unless you're totally doing it on purpose for effect.)

"Please bring a little extra from the heart./An unwrapped pack of diapers, to give them a good start" does not scan.

"Please bring a little extra from the heart" is fine. In fact, it's the classic rhythm in English-language poetry, iambic pentameter.** But the fourth line is completely off; it has entirely too many syllables to match up with the third line.

Behold:

please bring a  lit- tle ex- tra from the heart
an un- wrapped pack of dia- pers to give them
or
an un- wrapped pack of di- a- pers to give  

depending on how you pronounce "diapers."

Either "a good start" or "them a good start" are just trailing off there at the end, matching nothing in the preceding line. Orphan syllables! It breaks my heart.

You have to either race through the whole fourth line to try to cram it into the rhythm of the third, or just abandon the rhythm entirely, and then throw a lot of emphasis on "start" at the end, because hey, if you throw rhymes at the end of lines you can call it a day, right?

Wrong, consarn it, weren't you paying attention up at the top of this post? You cannot just throw words that rhyme with other words at the ends of lines that otherwise have no common rhythm and consider it verse!

What I would do here is basically scrap the entire last line as is and try to make something with a little more structure. Remember "Baa baa, black sheep"? It's a good example of two rhyming first lines followed by [something] that also has poetic rhythm.

Baa baa, black sheep, have you any wool?
Yes sir, yes sir, three bags full.
One for my master, and one for my dame,
And one for the little boy who lives down the lane.

That's the version I remember--slight word variations may be found--and in it we have a very simple, solid verse structure: two lines that rhyme (a couplet, we might say, if we wanted to throw around English Major terminology), followed by two more lines that also rhyme (with each other, but not with the first two).

The second couplet has a slightly different rhythm than the first--the lines are longer, for example--but it's still internally consistent (I demand this of my fictional worlds, and I demand it of my verse couplets). You may see this described as A, A, B, B structure.

The syllables in each line match up with the ones in the other, and it is very easily recited aloud in rhythm. Hence it being a nursery rhyme dating back hundreds of years.

The bit of baby shower doggerel I am here addressing seems to be trying for this A, A, B, B form, but misses badly on account of those orphan syllables at the end of the fourth line.

We could just compress the fourth line, adjusting a few words to make it fit:
A pack of diapers for a good clean start!

Or we could go for a more complex A, A, B, C, C, B structure.

Diapers every parent uses,
On those baby-soft cabooses,
So bring a pack to give them a good start!

Clearly the options are legion, as are my devoted followers. Again, I'm not saying this has become good verse (oh my no), but it's plainly possible to get the point across with lines that possess that all-important poetic rhythm.

You must have rhythm in your doggerel, my legions. Remember this, and you will go far in horrible yet neatly scannable verse.


*An iamb being a foot composed of two syllables, the second of which is stressed, as in the words 'delay,' or 'around;' quadrameter meaning there are four such feet in the line.

**An iamb continuing to be a foot composed of two syllables, the second of which is stressed, as in the words 'announce,' or 'behold;' pentameter meaning there are five such feet in the line.

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