The Chaos (by G. Nolst Trenité, a.k.a. "Charivarius"; 1870 - 1946)

Dearest creature in creation
Studying English pronunciation,

I will teach you in my verse
Sounds like corpse, corps, horse and worse

I will keep you, Susy, busy,
Make your head with heat grow dizzy.

Tear in eye your dress you'll tear,
So shall I! Oh, hear my prayer,

Pray, console your loving poet,
Make my coat look new, dear, sew it!

Just compare heart, beard and heard,
Dies and diet, lord and word,

Sword and sward, retain and Britain.
(Mind the latter, how it's written).

Made has not the sound of bade,
Say said, pay-paid, laid, but plaid.

Now I surely will not plague you
With such words as vague and ague,

But be careful how you speak,
Say break, steak, but bleak and streak.

Previous, precious, fuchsia, via,
Pipe, snipe, recipe and choir,

Cloven, oven, how and low,
Script, receipt, shoe, poem, toe.

Hear me say, devoid of trickery:
Daughter, laughter and Terpsichore,

Typhoid, measles, topsails, aisles.
Exiles, similes, reviles.

Wholly, holly, signal, signing.
Thames, examining, combining

Scholar, vicar, and cigar,
Solar, mica, war, and far.

From "desire": desirable--admirable from "admire."
Lumber, plumber, bier, but brier.

Chatham, brougham, renown, but known.
Knowledge, done, but gone and tone,

One, anemone. Balmoral.
Kitchen, lichen, laundry, laurel,

Gertrude, German, wind, and mind.
Scene, Melpomene, mankind,

Tortoise, turquoise, chamois-leather,
Reading, reading, heathen, heather.

This phonetic labyrinth
Gives moss, gross, brook, brooch, ninth, plinth.

Billet does not end like ballet;
Bouquet, wallet, mallet, chalet;

Blood and flood are not like food,
Nor is mould like should and would.

Banquet is not nearly parquet,
Which is said to rime with "darky."

Viscous, Viscount, load, and broad.
Toward, to forward, to reward.

And your pronunciation's O.K.,
When you say correctly: croquet.

Rounded, wounded, grieve, and sieve,
Friend and fiend, alive, and live,

Liberty, library, heave, and heaven,
Rachel, ache, moustache, eleven,

We say hallowed, but allowed,
People, leopard, towed, but vowed.

Mark the difference, moreover,
Between mover, plover, Dover,

Leeches, breeches, wise, precise,
Chalice, but police, and lice.

Camel, constable, unstable,
Principle, disciple, label,

Petal, penal, and canal,
Wait, surmise, plait, promise, pal.

Suit, suite, ruin, circuit, conduit,
Rime with "shirk it" and "beyond it."

But it is not hard to tell,
Why it's pall, mall, but Pall Mall.

Muscle, muscular, gaol, iron,
Timber, climber, bullion, lion,

Worm and storm, chaise, chaos, and chair,
Senator, spectator, mayor,

Ivy, privy, famous, clamour
And enamour rime with hammer.

Pussy, hussy, and possess,
Desert, but dessert, address.

Golf, wolf, countenance, lieutenants.
Hoist, in lieu of flags, left pennants.

River, rival, tomb, bomb, comb,
Doll and roll and some and home.

Stranger does not rime with anger.
Neither does devour with clangour.

Soul, but foul and gaunt but aunt.
Font, front, won't, want, grand, and grant.

Shoes, goes, does. Now first say: finger.
And then: singer, ginger, linger,

Real, zeal, mauve, gauze, and gauge,
Marriage, foliage, mirage, age.

Query does not rime with very,
Nor does fury sound like bury.

Dost, lost, post; and doth, cloth, loth;
Job, Job; blossom, bosom, oath.

Though the difference seems little,
We say actual, but victual.

Seat, sweat; chaste, caste.; Leigh, eight, height;
Put, nut; granite, and unite.

Reefer does not rime with deafer,
Feoffer does, and zephyr, heifer.

Dull, bull, Geoffrey, George, ate, late,
Hint, pint, Senate, but sedate.

Scenic, Arabic, Pacific,
Science, conscience, scientific,

Tour, but our and succour, four,
Gas, alas, and Arkansas.

Sea, idea, guinea, area,
Psalm, Maria, but malaria,

Youth, south, southern, cleanse and clean,
Doctrine, turpentine, marine.

Compare alien with Italian,
Dandelion with battalion.

Sally with ally, yea, ye,
Eye, I, ay, aye, whey, key, quay.

Say aver, but ever, fever.
Neither, leisure, skein, receiver.

Never guess--it is not safe:
We say calves, valves, half, but Ralph.

Heron, granary, canary,
Crevice and device, and eyrie,

Face but preface, but efface,
Phlegm, phlegmatic, ass, glass, bass.

Large, but target, gin, give, verging,
Ought, out, joust, and scour, but scourging,

Ear but earn, and wear and bear
Do not rime with here, but ere.

Seven is right, but so is even,
Hyphen, roughen, nephew, Stephen,

Monkey, donkey, clerk, and jerk,
Asp, grasp, wasp, and cork and work.

Pronunciation--think of psyche--!
Is a paling, stout and spikey,

Won't it make you lose your wits,
Writing "groats" and saying "grits"?

It's a dark abyss or tunnel,
Strewn with stones, like rowlock, gunwale,

Islington and Isle of Wight,
Housewife, verdict, and indict!

Don't you think so, reader, rather,
Saying lather, bather, father?

Finally: which rimes with "enough"
Though, through, plough, cough, hough, or tough?

Hiccough has the sound of "cup."
My advice is--give it up!

If your best defense of Harry is that Tom and Dick are axe murderers too, then you need to rethink your priorities.

what on earth makes you think i LIKE harry? whats to like?

all im saying is theyre in the same business. i didnt say they were both literal nazis.

One party runs and defends accused pedophile as a candidate.

i dont know if this picture is even real, but:



what im saying is-- whatever.

ive been protesting war since before the iraq invasion. if americans NEED to go fight, i dont have a problem with that. i have a problem with illegal wars for profit

ive watched "both" parties for two decades in disbelief, while they erode every sort of freedom and do every sort of bad thing for profit, but shit when you say one is a nazi and the other isnt, i guess thats all the difference in the world.

BEFORE trump was in office however, i said that both parties catered to war criminals. so IF (and i dont want to twist anything you said) YOUR argument is that nazis and war criminals are TOTALLY different things--

yep! youre right. im totally conflating ORDINARY war criminals with NAZI ones. but to me thats not different enough to make one good and one bad. they both suck. a lot. maybe you dont feel that way. cool.

im sure you dont want to hear about the nazi connections of the left, either. but if you think one party is like “yeah, nazis” and the other isnt, theres a lot of political history (not ancient history,ongoing history) youre missing out on.

im NOT saying one nazi party is better than the other. thats someone elses argument. im saying theyre not that different.

you want to know their secret? its narcissism.

everybody knows trump is a narcissistic sociopath. most people have no idea what a covert narcissist is. the right is made up of overt narcissists, or TERRIBLE covert ones. the left… understand covert narcissism and you understand the left completely. im not talking about their supporters-- im talking about the bulk of the politicians.

when did politicians go from people you could tell were lying because their lips were moving, to people who if you spoke badly of them, it obviously makes you a liar? weve flipped the world so that politicians are honest and critics are bad. whoa, thats the not the world i come from. maybe youre younger, i dont know.

in practice it works out less like regress / progress, more like good cop, bad cop.

trump takes the world so far off the deep end, that theyre ready for ANYTHING better than that. same with bush jr and obama.

biden will likely be the most fascist democrat in history-- or the closest thing to it. hes right of centre, the sort of person they call a republican in democrat clothing. but people are so tired of bad cop that theyre willing to surrender to this, as long as its not as bad as trump.

in the short run, its literally progress.

in the long run though-- this is my point-- weve seen this before and it constitutes a stock-market-like up/down trend that continues to go downhill. it wont come back up far enough to save us. we have two teams that are (by design) more committed to corporate plundering than society. the lesser of two evils isnt a route to progress at all-- only lesser evil, the sum of which gets only worse over time. so youre really only choosing a slower rot over a faster one. but we are to believe that will restore anything. the math is very, very simple. it shouldnt be fooling anybody, except it plays on fear and emotions-- there is no logic applied on the voters side, only the pretense of it to justify a destructive course of action; the lesser of two. the fallacy killing america is a simple false dichotomy, but 20 years of that is destroying the nation.

(You have a nice writing style, btw, thank you for all the comments, @betrayed by freesw , even if I do sometimes come at you all cranky pants.)

you made my week, thats a really nice compliment. i thought we were going to be adversaries (no really, i just thought id be ignored-- its what im used to)

if youve got crankypants, ive got cranky coveralls. im angry and bitter and silly.

Mostly, I’m just fed up with human stupidity, and the idea of dumping some of the baggage felt good at the time I wrote that.

hey, if thats all, go ahead-- all the instruments searching for intelligent life are pointed away from earth anyway.

im agnostic myself, but with government im an atheist.

i LIKE progressives, but i feel the dnc is holding those back (i have proof) - its going to be painful and difficult to move past that.

you can (will) still ignore me if you have to but its on you if you mistake me for a troll. im just pissy. i want real progress too, so chances are im always going to be pissy. have a nice week, and wow, i hope the states make it through this bs. even if they raise the average level of crazy on earth, practically everybody deserves better than this shit. cheers.

OMG “Brexit” was such a fucking Bad Idea. Definitely one of those cases of “choices have consequences,”

fortunately i got out of there long before the outcome of brexit could affect me.

i have very mixed feelings about it-- there doesnt seem to be anything positive at all about brexit-- both a european unionless uk and the eu itself seem to be a complete political disaster. the words “better than china” come to mind, though i do quite like asia in a broader sense.

i could go on about the eu all day long. i think for most people its the IDEA of the eu. that bothers me less.

my concern is the reality of the eu.

you can rest assured, nothing convinces me the reality of the uk without the eu so far seems better. if i had to sum it up, it seems more like they said “lets compromise-- we get all the bad parts of leaving, but we KEEP all the bad parts we would take on if we stayed!” and i suppose that was enough to make everybody happy.

the funny thing is, i have an optimistic side. NOT ABOUT EUROPE! but in order for me to show my optimistic side i have to wait for everybody i know to stop laughing. hey, i do too! shut up, guys.

seriously though, im not all doom and gloom. but mostly i am, so its alright if people think that. what i am very good at is pointing at something and going “okay-- heres why this is a terrible idea!” and i LOVE-- LOVE when im wrong about that. i wish it happened a bit more.

i loved the uk, but saying i still miss it would be a stretch. oh, i got the metaphor incidentally. no worries.