Mathematical Gymnastic Linguistics

I'm a pestic what?!?

Who would have thought that coming up with a story and then making it rhyme was the easy part? 

I am currently working on a re-write of Chasing Tail and am mostly focussing on getting the rhythm consistent.  When talking about rhythm, one enters a whole new realm.  A whole new language.  The linguists have made up lots of funny sounding words and even taken common words from the English language and given them new meaning, just to describe… <drum roll please> how the English language works.

Navigating the shores of diphthongs, triphthongs, schwas and demi-syllables (linguistics)… and the stormy seas of iambic, dactyl, anapestic and trochaic patterns of feet in lines of trimeter, tetrameter, pentameter or hexameter (mathematics)… one must also be somewhat flexible (gymnastics) in order to bend the words into coherent verse (let alone a complete story).

Needless to say, I’ve just developed an even stronger appreciation for the likes of Theodor Geisel (aka Dr Seuss) who was obviously a grand master mathematical gymnastic linguist.

Just for the record, I am aiming for rhyming couplets in anapestic tetrameter for my re-write.

da da DUM da da DUM da da DUM da da DUM

da da DUM da da DUM da da DUM da da DUM

And be damned how many syllables the dictionaries claim are in the word “smile”; I’m counting it as two beats J