Homophone Rhymes

I’m not sure how many of my approved OEDILF limericks have homophone rhymes, but it’s more than zero. I even have an early limerick that rhymes no and know, a rhyme now considered particularly egregious, which was called an “excellent, excellent piece!” in its workshop.

It seems strange to me that a limerick can have all sorts of other things going for it, yet as soon as a homophone is spotted it becomes a dealbreaker. My Dakar limerick turns this homophone-aversion on itself by building the entire joke around it and adds a few more besides, to which the first response was “the homophones don’t bother you?” No. No, they don’t. (“Gee, Mister Reich, this music of yours is a bit repetitive. That doesn’t bother you?”)

We’ve been so conditioned that we have to raise the issue every time we spot it in a workshop. I do it too, just to make sure the issue is acknowledged and won’t sink the approval process at some later stage. I suspect a lot of us pay the issue lip-service because we get the feeling that it worries others more than ourselves. Hence we see pieces on the cusp of approval where the issue gets raised and workshoppers say “oops, didn’t notice that, you’d better change it”—as if the fact that we hadn’t noticed it before means nothing.

We’re now at the point where a homophone-rhyming limerick has to have a degree of difficulty of ten to be considered as approvable as a humdrum offering that employs regular rhymes. But it’s easy to write a piece that has regular A and B rhymes: cat, mat, sat, no, go. The fact that a particular rhyme is regular or homophone shouldn’t be the clincher when there are so many other things to consider in judging the difficulty of a rhyme. How about “is a homophone the mot juste here, and how contrived is the alternative you’ve employed to avoid it?”

 

This gets to the heart of the problem I have with homophone avoidance for the sake of it. It cuts off whole possible limericks, not just a word or a syllable.

About one in seven of my first 140 limericks had homophone rhymes, but only one in seventy of my next 140. Beyond those, I would expect the rate to be even lower, because I’d clearly taken onboard that these were to be avoided in OEDILF limericks. Not coincidentally, I’ve always felt there was a clear difference between my early 2004 pieces and my later OEDILF work, a difference which set in after I’d been there two or three months.

But most of them are nice limericks that nowadays I wouldn’t dream of writing, let alone submitting, because my inner OEDILF censor steers me away from homophones as soon as I notice them—and I notice them much more because of that inner censor, same as I notice the edit points in “Strawberry Fields Forever” since learning where they are.

And that’s what I find sad about this whole “avoid homophones” idea—the cutting off of possibilities, many of which are good ones. I wouldn’t change any of those crusty old homophones of mine, because that “weakness” still doesn’t bother me as much as their strengths amuse me. But I know that I’d never have written the same verses today.

 

Non-OEDILF limericks don’t have a “no homophone rhymes” constraint. I know we pride ourselves on doing things better at the OEDILF, but every constraint we impose does reduce the number of opportunities we have as writers; logically, it has to. We might consider our constrained limericks better, but those better options would be just as available to us in a more liberal OEDILF.

I’m not saying that every homophone rhyme is defensible. When the choice of rhymes is wide and the one chosen seems arbitrary, it’s time to look again. But that reasonable message seems to have become distorted into “no homophones ever” in practice, even though we all might admit to exceptions now and then. The constraint can be useful in improving the overall quality of one’s limerick-writing, especially when learning the ropes, but as a criticism of individual limericks it can be unhelpful. Even if a certain percentage of limericks with homophone rhymes suck, what about the ones that don’t? Yet every time we point out a homophone, even if we’re “just sayin’”, we’re sending the message that something is somehow wrong, even if it isn’t.

I looked closely at those early limericks of mine, asking “was this homophone necessary?”—and they all were to the jokes in those particular limericks. Even avoiding a simple homophone like no/know has big implications for rhyme schemes, metre, and ultimately the whole tenor of a piece, when you consider that neither word has a one-syllable synonym with the same rhyme.

Some pieces used rhymes to emphasize puns, like acetylene/unsettlin’, ankylosaur/ankles are sore, rhythmic/algorithmic, alcoholize/alcohol eyes. I almost never try anything like that now, unless it’s an internal rhyme (apart from the Dakar one mentioned above, which I knew would get homophone objections). These days I would have killed the homophone lines in an early draft and never even seen where they led.

Reworked from comments written for an OEDILF Forum thread, March 2009.