Hip hop suggests that doggerel can achieve a surprising flexibility, ranging from the comic to the serious, from the delicate to the vulgar. It would be a mistake, though, to say the technique determines the result. 

This essay considers how the Somali-born hip-hop artist K’naan occasionally uses rhymes that embody a slight but perceptually noticeable shift in the rhythms of global Englishes. Our verse prosody is being reshaped by the rhythmic contours of speakers who bring the prosody of their first language to bear upon their rhythmicization of English. This is no matter of local or virtuosic performance but a structural shift in the texture of our language.

Unlike democracy, rhyme’s mode of expectation invites a belief in inevitable and rapid fulfillment. Rhyme unfulfilled precipitates apocalyptic feeling, as in Cohen’s “The Future,” where fratricide hangs in the balance of a half-rhyme: "I’ve seen the future brother: / It is murder." 

One modern incarnation of the debate between nominalism and realism is to be found in philosophical arguments about sets.  There are two ways of characterizing a set: intensionally, through description (e.g. the set of all inhabitants of London, to use an example of Russell's), and extensionally, which is just a list of the members of the set.

Following up on my earlier post on Nantucket, as well as all the discussion here about Ngrams, I want to offer a few spontaneous speculations based on a new paper that's the talk of at least a couple of neighborhoods in the town.

Sometimes you notice an aesthetic effect or technique and assume that there must be a name for it. But how can you look it up? Maybe you can just ask.

My relationship to poetry took a sharp turn for the worse the day I learned that Emily Dickinson's poetry could be recited to the tune of the "Yellow Rose of Texas."  (This observation is far from original, and there are scores of other tunes that work as well for the Dickinsonian canon for reasons that are well explained elsewhere, but the moment in which this unfortunate coupling occurred to me was nonetheless a shock to my system.)