Primed to Love Rhyme

Hello, you have A Way with Words.

Hi, Martha and Grant. My name is Lindsay. I’m calling from San Diego.

Hey, Lindsay. Welcome.

Hi, Lindsay. What’s going on?

Hi. Thanks for taking my call.

So, my question is more cultural, I suppose, and it’s motivated by a couple years ago I had the opportunity to au pair in Rome, Italy.

Oh, wow.

And I was taking care of a couple boys. They were 8 and 12 at the time.

And I’m not particularly good with kids.

I haven’t been around a lot of kids.

And so I just, I would kind of habitually try to rhyme with them or I would throw out these kind of silly rhymes that I’m very used to.

So I would say, you know, when we were getting ready to leave, I would say, are you ready, Freddie?

And when we play games and I’d, you know, even up the score, I’d say, we’re even Steven.

And I’d say, no way, Jose, and maybe baby, and see you later, alligator, and try to get them to, you know, do the after a while crocodile.

And they just thought I was crazy.

They just did not think it was as charming as I did, obviously.

And I’m curious as to, is this an English thing? Is it an American thing? Do other cultures have rhyming?

I know you guys have mentioned that we are particularly fond of rhymes in this country, and they tend to stick.

And so I was curious as to why that is.

Yeah, it’s playful and fun, right?

And I think that as humans, we’re sort of wired for this kind of thing.

I mean, there have been studies of pregnant women who read Hop on Pop or The Cat in the Hat, some Dr. Seuss books before the baby is born in the last trimester.

And when the babies are born, they end up recognizing the meter and the rhyme.

They do this little sucking response.

Oh, really? I was wondering how you get feedback from a baby that young.

But it’s related to our automatic appreciation for music, which doesn’t have to be taught, right?

Absolutely. And I mean, it’s the way you learn things. There have been studies that show that if you rhyme, you learn better. Or if you set whatever you’re trying to memorize to music, you learn better. So I think it is a really universal thing. And of course, we have all these rhymes in English, but I drive my Spanish-speaking friends crazy by when I greet them, I say, que te pasa calabaza, which means, what’s going on, pumpkin? And I think it’s something that they learn for, you know, when they’re little kids.

And so it’s kind of cute.

And the mouth of an adult, it’s weird.

You know, Lindsay, I had a question.

You said you were an au pair who wasn’t good with kids.

Isn’t it like a banker who’s not good with money?

Yeah.

No, it is.

It actually, I was an au pair of sorts.

My actual function was just to speak English.

Oh, gotcha.

So you’re teaching these kids kind of the stuff they weren’t getting in school.

Right.

So kind of just our idioms, and I would use a lot of phrases.

And of course, you know, they don’t translate well, so I’d try to explain them.

But just kind of in casual conversation and I guess just trying to be charming and make friends and use these little rhymes.

And they just didn’t get them, you know.

Yeah, it’s hard to see idioms through the eyes of a native speaker if you don’t know that language well yourself.

English does have some characteristics that other languages don’t automatically share.

Many of the Romance languages, for example, have kind of standard word endings for conjugating verbs and so forth.

And so it’s easy to make rhymes in English and the Romance languages and even many of the Germanic languages.

Other languages don’t do their word endings the same way, so they don’t depend as heavily on rhyme.

They depend more on alliteration or reduplication or even just the meter so that the syllable count feels the same or the emphasis or accent is the same.

And so there’s a lot of different ways that humans seek that kind of almost musical quality in the spoken language, but it doesn’t always manifest the same as it does in English.

Interesting.

Yeah, so, I mean, rhyming, obviously, is a device for learning and remembering.

It’s obvious, but then we just have these, like, totally meaningless, like, okie-dokie artichoke.

Like, it just seems so weird.

Yeah, there are plenty of these in German, too.

Nicht schlecht, Herr Specht.

That means not bad, Mr. Woodpecker.

I mean, it doesn’t, you know, it’s silly, silly, but the rhyme saves it, right?

Right.

Well, thank you so much.

I appreciate it.

Okay.

Yeah, sure.

Thanks for calling.

Appreciate it, Lindsay.

Bye-bye.

See you later.

All right.

Yeah, bye.

What are your overseas experiences with language?

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