new vocab

[fflo]

Always new words.  Do you know "nacelle" and "ferrule"?  Will I forget which is which, having learned them so close to each other?  Will the etymology help, somehow?  Nacelle's is a diminutive of ship, and ferrule's got a diminutive of bracelets combined with iron.

Did I ever tell you about the first (and only) date who was shocked that I'd used a word she didn't know, because she knows all the words?  Of course that was it for her, with me.  I think of her more than I might otherwise because I sometimes am near or on Haggerty Road.  She'd suggested we meet at a place there, and at some point the "Haggerty corridor" came up --- it just struck me that it's a double dactyl.  She'd never heard of dactyls.

Gee, I left this draft sitting, and didn't post it OR the Postcard of the Day, yesterday....

 

Comments

[fflo.livejournal.com]

It's all about the accents within the "feet", or subsections of the line. Pentameter is a line of 5 strong beats, and iambs are 2-beat feet (unaccented followed by accented), so a line of iambic pentameter has 10 syllables altogether.

A dactyl is one of the three-beat feet. Anapest is another. With anapest you can remember where the accent falls by pronouncing the word wrong, and calling it an anaPEST. "Dactyl" only has 2 syllables, though, so I used to say dacTIHdyl to remember where the accent fell. ("Said CONrad o'CONner o'DONnell o'DELL, my VERy young FRIEND who is LEARNing to SPELL" — that's 2 sets of 3 dactyls plus 1 iamb.)

"iamb" is not an iamb but a trochee.

Poetry really meets lyrics in metrical feet, and other elements of prosody. Like the math in the music. When I was very young and I made up lines, I didn't use regular feet, so long as the accents felt natural where they fell. Later I found that that's what poetry people call "sprung rhythm"--- this Victorian guy Hopkins (not Johns, Gerard Manley) wrote that way.

I learned this stuff from Latin class, though, with the Aeneid, which is also sprung rhythm. We had to mark the scansion on it for my in-some-ways not-so-great 2nd Latin teacher. But that stuff about the syllables was good stuff.

[peteralway.livejournal.com]

For some reason, talk about poetic syllables just makes my brain fog over and explode. Like differential equations, it's the kind of math that hurts my head.