Monday, November 30, 2009

A great observation

So this post from Laura Wattenberg's "Baby Name Wizard" blog has a wonderful observation:
Here's a little pet peeve of mine: nothing rhymes with orange. You've heard that before, right? Orange is famous for its rhymelessness. There's even a comic strip called "Rhymes with Orange." Fine then, let me ask you something. What the heck rhymes with purple?

If you stop and think about it, you'll find that English is jam-packed with rhymeless common words. What rhymes with empty, or olive, or silver, or circle? You can even find plenty of one-syllable words like wolf, bulb, and beige. Yet orange somehow became notorious for its rhymelessness, with the curious result that people now assume its status is unique.


I was directed to the quote by Andrew Gelman's Statistical Modeling blog, and he has other posts about names and sounds.

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