Trying to rhyme orange, silver and purple
In penning their verses, the majority of songwriters and poets normally stay well away from words that have no obvious rhyme: orange, silver, and purple are prime examples. Also try rhyming the word “month”.
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I’ll let you keep thinking on those for a bit.
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While there are many perfectly acceptable ways to hold a verse or two together without the use of rhyme, it’s always been a tantalising challenge to try and do the seemingly impossible in wordplay. In his book “Words at Play“, MENSA International Journal puzzle columnist O.V. Michaelsen provides a few creative ways to rhyme some of these words:
- MONTH – rhymes perfectly with an obscure English word “grunth“. It’s an alternate spelling of the word “Granth“, the name of the sacred scriptures of the Sikh religion.
- ORANGE – “Blorenge” is the name of a 1,833-foot hill in Abergavenny, Wales.
- PURPLE – “Hirple” is a British word meaning “to limp”, while the word “curple” refers to the hindquarters and buttocks of a horse
- SILVER – “Chilver” is an old English word referring to either an ewe lamb or mutton
Of course, there are more challenging words like the above: try and think of a rhyme to go with the words ninth, pint, wolf, opus, marathon, dangerous, and discombobulate.
In the world of songwriting there’s a couple of brave folk who do give these words a decent go. The one that I can think of straight away is in the chorus of MIKA’s “Grace Kelly”, where the Lebanese-American singer exhorts:
“I can be brown, I can be blue
I can be violet sky
I can be hurtful, I can be purple
I can be anything you like
Gotta be green, gotta be mean
gotta be everything more
Why don’t you like me, why don’t you like me,
Why don’t you walk out the door?”
Granted, the rhyme works partly because he sings “hurtful” and “purple” in a high falsetto. And there’s also the fact that MIKA pronounces “hurtful” more like “hurh’ fle”… but it’s still a good effort.
Anyone know of any other songs where artists have given some of these “unrhymables” a good go?
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fate, rate, migrate all rhyme with discombobulate.
It’s not just the last syllable that needs to be rhymed though, for it to be a true rhyme – the syllables discombobu- all need a pair-up. Now that’s tricky!
NO RHYMES FOR ORANGE, PURPLE, SILVER, AND MONTH?
In spite of what might have been heard,
That claim is just lame and absurd.
For a whole month I dreamt
By my thousandth attempt,
’stead of none, I found one for each word.
(I could have written an alternate to this:
“In spite of what might have been written,
There are claims of some names in Great Britain…”)
In honor of these discoveries, I present this two-part limerick.
There once was a dunce known as Orange,
Who got his toe caught in a door hinge.
Said he, turning purple,
Proceeding to hirple,
“I bet I won’t get back to Blorenge.”
I resolved the story with a verse using the other difficult rhyme.
A passerby named Mr. Wilver,
Who traded his horse for a chilver,
Offered Orange the lamb,
But he mounted a ram
And rode home yelling, “Oh, Hiyo Silver!”
Other near-rhymes for “orange” include sporange, (pronounced “spe-RANJ” [short for sporangium]), more range, and far range.
—“Stubborn Rhymes,” O.V. (as “Ove”) Michaelsen, Word Ways, May 2001, revised in July 2008
In grammar school, just passing time,
I wrote a so-so double rhyme:
“This purple bird is dumb an’ lazy,
And his chirp’ll drive one crazy.”
Fortunately, in the song “Dang Me,” Roger Miller did not use the word “curple.”
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My BEST to you.
Straight from the horses mouth – now we all know these words can be rhymed! Fantastic stuff!