"One I first saw": more on homophonically induced typing errors
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A little over a week ago, I described how I mistyped "stalk" for "stock". That led to a vigorous discussion of precisely how people pronounce "stalk". (As a matter of fact, in my own idiolect I do pronounce "stock" and "stalk" identically.) See:
"Take stalk of: thoughts on philology and Sinology" (3/29/20)
I just now typed "One I first saw…" when I meant "When I first saw…".
This is proof that, at least for me, such typing errors do not need to be exact homophones or even close / near homophones. So long as there is a general resemblance between the vehicle word and the target word, soundwise, it is easy for me to substitute the former for the latter, which is what I really want to produce.
This happens to me quite often when I'm thinking and typing very fast. For the record, I have been an extremely rapid typist already since high school. In those days, we used to have mechanical typewriters with metal linkages between the keys and the type that struck the platen. It was frustrating, but also funny, that when I got going really, really fast, the typewriter couldn't keep up with me, and a whole bunch of keys would get clogged together in the type guide.
When I went to college, my father bought me an Olivetti portable typewriter, and I loved it dearly. I carried it all round the world with me, though it weighed 8.2 pounds. The Lettera 22 was a thing of beauty. I derived aesthetic pleasure just from looking at it, touching its keys, and pushing the smooth, chrome lever for the carriage return.
Then, when the IBM Selectric came out in 1961, with its interchangeable typeballs, electronic speed was wedded to mechanical precision. I watched the whirling ball with fascination, and was amazed that, no matter how fast one typed, it always struck the correct letter on that little sphere in the exact spot on the paper that one desired. The electromechanical engineering of the Selectric must have been of a very high high degree indeed. I often tried to defeat the Selectric by typing as fast as I could, but I don't think I ever succeeded in doing so, not once, so far as I recall. The challenge was just too great for nerves and muscles of a human being to conquer the precise electronics and the fine construction of the machine.
Now, in the digital, electronic age, there's no way I can possibly defeat a computer with even my fastest typing speed, though I'm still in the long ingrained habit of trying to do so. As I watch the text come pouring out onto the computer screen, I'm often amused at the mistakes I make (as I noted at the beginning of the "take stalk of" post).
I don't know what processes take place when others type, but for me introspective analysis seems to break them down thus:
1. a semi-conscious stream of thoughts, things I want to say
2. semi-articulate "speaking" them in my head — not all of the sounds of the word-streams as I would if I were reading or declaiming out loud, but just the main contours of the key words in my head; here nothing conscious is going on — it's just as if I were talking to myself, but not enunciating each phoneme
3. as soon as I "hear" / produce the sound in my head, the relevant letters come out through my fingers; of course, I don't think of each and all the letters of a word when I type it; for example, if I type "through", I do not decompose it down to the constituent letters — "t-h-r-o-u-g-h" — I just say something like "thru" in my brain, without worrying about how to spell "through" correctly. It just flows out through my arms and fingers. It's usually only after the word appears on the computer screen that I might notice it is misspelled, although occasionally as I'm rushing along typing I will "feel" that something is not quite right about the way the word is coming out. In that case, I might slow down a little bit to look more carefully at what is happening.
The human-machine interface that produces a typed document is a wondrous symbiotic relationship, and — given the complexity of it all — I'm astonished at how what comes out is usually right.
The story of logographic (non-phonetic) Chinese typewriting is all the more mind-boggling, one that we have often touched upon here at Language Log. Warning: don't believe all the fairy tales of recent, sensational, semi-scholarly works on this subject.
Selected readings
- "Chinese Typewriter" (6/30/09)
- "Chinese typewriter, part 2" (4/17/11)
- "Chinese character inputting" (10/17/15)
- "Chinese typewriter redux" (11/5/16)
- "Backward Thinking about Orientalism and Chinese Characters" (5/16/16)
- "Which is worse?" (1/21/16)
- "Writing Sinitic languages with phonetic scripts" (5/20/16)
- "Zhou Youguang, Father of Pinyin" (1/14/14)
- "Zhou Youguang 1906-2017" (1/14/17)
- "The impact of phonetic inputting on Chinese languages" (12/9/19)
Thaomas said,
April 8, 2020 @ 2:04 pm
I don;t know if its was deliberate but the placement of the H/J and V/B on the QWERTY keyboard "helps" me mistype in Spanish as the sound of H in English is similar to J in Spanish and B to V or B in Spanish.
Mark P said,
April 8, 2020 @ 2:21 pm
It’s interesting that you describe the words as flowing down your arms through your hands to the keyboard, because that is exactly the way I have described writing stories when I was a newspaper reporter more than 40 years ago. I felt that the story kind of drained out of my brain, and if I ever somehow lost the story, I had trouble reconstructing it. We were using dumb terminals by that time so there was no paper record.
David Moser said,
April 8, 2020 @ 2:31 pm
Very fascinating observations, Victor. Speech errors can be so revelatory. This type of error might go under the heading of "phonetic decay" errors in writing, which I mention in my article "Slips of the Tongue and Pen in Chinese" in Sino-Platonic Papers No. 22 (http://sino-platonic.org/complete/spp022_chinese_slips.pdf). From which I quote this:
"If a target word, once retrieved, waits in short-term memory long
enough, very often the result is partial forgetting or "phonetic decay" – a
loss or degradation of the phonological information in the word
(Hotopf,1983). The following are a few examples in English from written
texts:
Ex. 71. "…particularly with this letter …" (with this weather)
Ex. 72. "I might as well twin around and do it again." (turn around)
Ex. 73. "Okay, so far, find." (so far, fine)
There are a couple of Chinese examples in the article, but I'd love to have more to add to the corpus.
B.Ma said,
April 8, 2020 @ 3:15 pm
The 3 stages describe my own typing process exactly, at least in English.
With regard to typing in Chinese, even though I perform Stage 2 in Cantonese (albeit not fully "enunciating each phoneme"), in Stage 3 it is pinyin that just flows out through my arms and fingers without requiring any conscious conversion from Cantonese to Mandarin.
I can't get my head around systems like cangjie or Q9, and even the Cantonese CPIME is hard for me – I only use that when I want Cantonese-specific characters that are hard to input using pinyin.
Ben Zimmer said,
April 8, 2020 @ 4:01 pm
Unlike "one" for "when," the "stalk" for "stock" substitution may be further encouraged by a semantic justification of the eggcorn variety. When I contributed the "stalk"->"stock" entry for the Eggcorn Database back in 2005 (link), I only considered "laughing stalk" and "livestalk," though it could be extended to "take stalk of." There's also the opposite substitution, as in "bean stock," "corn stock" and "cyberstocking" (link).
Martin said,
April 8, 2020 @ 4:31 pm
I've been amused by my own typos, and have collected them over many years. Most are homophones or close-homophones (e.g. "written" for "ridden"; "with" for "width"; etc.) but several of the more outlandish substitutions are "avenue" for "afternoon"; "member" for "memory"; and "interrupt" for "interpret".
Chris Button said,
April 8, 2020 @ 5:51 pm
@ Victor Mair
I'm curious what word you were focusing on in the sentence. If you were going in your head with the occasional unstressed form [wən] instead of [wɛn] "when", then you would have been running into /wʌn/ "one", which for many Americans is just [wən] again.
Victor Mair said,
April 8, 2020 @ 6:55 pm
@Chris Button
"first" or "saw" could have been the most salient thought in my mind; "when" and "I" would have been secondary
Julian said,
April 8, 2020 @ 7:45 pm
Ah, the satisfying thunk of the carriage return! No 'enter' key can ever fully replace it.
Surely someone could make a computer with a carriage return? A bit like the cell phone for old folks:
https://www.pinterest.com.au/pin/165999936238278466/
Julian said,
April 8, 2020 @ 8:08 pm
I make the normal range of 'finger mistakes' (transposed, doubled, omitted letters etc)
I make mistakes that arise from failing to switch off the autopilot in a timely way: eg producing 'government' instead of the target 'governor' because in 95 per of instances of my typing 'govern-' is followed by '-ment'.
But I don't recall ever making the type of phonetically-based mistake that you describe. Maybe different people call on their aural/visual/linguistic/kinaesthetic brain in different proportions according to their individual strengths and weaknesses in the various departments.
Michele Sharik Pituley said,
April 8, 2020 @ 9:04 pm
> For the record, I have been an extremely rapid typist already since high school.
Maybe OT, but this construction struck me as unusual, combining "have been" with "already since". Was it intentional? (meaning: is this the way you actually would say this sentence IRL as part of your idiolect?) or did you mean "had been" — which to me still sounds odd, since my idiolect would produce "had already been…"?
Thanks! :-)
Michele Sharik Pituley said,
April 8, 2020 @ 9:06 pm
Oh, I forgot something! The "have been … already since" reminds me of how some non-native-English speakers construct some sentences, especially those who natively speak an Asian language. Knowing that VM teaches Chinese, I was wondering if that's an influence.
Coby Lubliner said,
April 8, 2020 @ 9:58 pm
The novelist Elizabeth George mistyped "undo" for "undue" in one of her novels, and the reverse in another; both typos made it into print. I know that there are variants of American English that don't palatalize the "d" in "undue", but George grew up in California, where this is not usually heard.
cameron said,
April 9, 2020 @ 12:26 am
@Michele Sharik Pituley – I think that "have been . . . already since . . ." construction is also common in Indian English
Jon said,
April 9, 2020 @ 1:09 am
I once typed "which" when I intended to type "that". For me, either worked in the context. But I was annoyed: it felt as though a sub-editor had intervened between my brain and my fingers.
Neil Kubler said,
April 9, 2020 @ 2:54 am
Yes, slips of the tongue and blends can provide a window into "deep structure" and what is going on inside our brains. I currently live in Taiwan but recently said to an English-speaking friend here, "I'm going to maai some melons" (maai being the Chinese word for 'buy'). I can tell what happened: since I've been speaking more Mandarin than English the past few weeks, Chinese maai slipped in for English "buy", which rhymes with it and also has a bilabial initial (made with the lips). Moreover, the word "melon" was going to come up later in the sentence, so I was probably also influenced by that "m" (often there are MULTIPLE influences for such slips and blends). Rhyme and sound patterns are important! A couple of months ago in the States, I said to a friend "Let me pay the capsie fare (taxi + cab = capsie"). And I have a note in a linguistics notebook of something a Chinese professor of mine once said in Mandarin when he meant to say "I can't find (something)": Wo zhao3bu0dao2. What happened there is that he superimposed the tones of Wo zhao3bu0zhao2 (another way of saying "I can't find") onto what should have been Wo zhao3bu0dao4, giving the ungrammatical blend "zhao3bu0dao2".
unekdoud said,
April 9, 2020 @ 3:21 am
I often experience the opposite phenomenon, getting so aware of the typing motions that even "its" and "it's" are worlds apart.
Philip Taylor said,
April 9, 2020 @ 3:25 am
Jon — Oh no, a sub-edtior would have substituted "that" when you quite correctly wrote "which", not the other way around ! And my typo of the day, almost sent to a book vendor from whom I had just received a book intended for someone else — "Gabriel García Márquez's Live in the time of cholera.
Victor Mair said,
April 9, 2020 @ 6:15 am
@Neil Kubler
I have made exactly the same mistake as you with regard to "maai " and "buy". Your analysis is spot on, both in this case and in the other interesting instances you cite.
Kate Bunting said,
April 9, 2020 @ 1:14 pm
Like Julian, I find that kind of typing error an entirely unfamiliar concept. Perhaps because I remember words in a very visual way, I can't imagine making an error based on the sound of a word.
Michael Watts said,
April 9, 2020 @ 1:24 pm
Interesting! This doesn't agree at all with my personal views on "when":
1. The unstressed form /wən/ is the default and by far the most common form; like articles and pronouns, the word "when" should never be stressed unless sentence stress falls on it for some reason particular to the conversation. ("No no, I asked WHEN you bought it")
2. The stressed form might be /wɪn/ and not /wɛn/, though on further reflection /wɛn/ seems acceptable.
Michele Sharik Pituley said,
April 9, 2020 @ 2:17 pm
@Cody:
>I know that there are variants of American English that don't palatalize the "d" in "undue", but George grew up in California, where this is not usually heard.
I grew up in southwestern Ohio, but now live in California. I pronounce undo and undue the same, though I have heard others pronounce undue as un-dyu. So many people who live in California moved here from somewhere else, so I'm not sure there is a "California topolect" anymore, or at least not a stable one.
FWIW, I initially typed "herd" instead of "heard" above, only catching it on a re-read. LOL
I grew up among some people who said "hearded" (here-ded) instead of "heard". As in, "I hearded you."
Michael Watts said,
April 9, 2020 @ 3:13 pm
I have lived in California for most of my life, including until I was 5, and I would not differentiate undo from undue.
I find it odd to describe it as "palatalizing the 'd' in 'undue'", though… surely what's going on is that some people feel the orthographic letter U (and/or digraph EW) should be pronounced with an initial /j/, and the D has no influence on that one way or the other.
I'm kind of curious where this "the letter U begins with a /j/" thing originated. It's visible in "curious" / "cute" / "fury" / "sure" / "U" and all over the place, but it doesn't seem to be related to pronunciation… at all. No one has an intrusive /j/ in "loose" / "boot" / "furry".
KB said,
April 9, 2020 @ 6:49 pm
"already since" also sounded odd to me, but put me in mind of German "schon seit". (I tend to blame all US-English strangeness on German, if I can.)
Chas Belov said,
April 9, 2020 @ 11:59 pm
I have for most of my life been plagued by write-os, in which, while hand-printing, I confuse "d," "t," and "r." "D" and "t" make sense because they are a voiced/unvoiced pair, but I have no idea why I would write "r" for either one of them. It's been a while since I've noticed it happening, so this is recollection, but I'm pretty sure it's one-directional. That is, I don't write "d" or "t" for "r."
J.W. Brewer said,
April 10, 2020 @ 6:24 am
Here's a seasonally appropriate example: I just saw someone on the internet refer (via their typing fingers) to this 17th-century poem on the theme of Good Friday as "Riding Westwood" rather than "Riding Westward," and googling reveals that it's not the first time that that substitution has been made — in both instances presumably by non-rhotic speakers for whom the two possibilities are homophones. ("westwood" doesn't obviously make sense in context, but it's a poem and so maybe it just seems allusive-and-poetic rather than nonsensical?)
https://www.poetryfoundation.org/poems/44103/good-friday-1613-riding-westward
Andrew Usher said,
April 10, 2020 @ 7:13 am
Michael Watts:
Indeed 'when' is most normally unstressed, but I can't imagine that being confused with 'one' (which is normally stressed).
With respect to undo/undue and such, those are true homophones for almost all American speakers and the substitution is well known though grammatically ill-motivated. The pronunciation difference is not related to spelling as such but has historical roots: all words with historical 'long U' had [y ~ iu], which normally becomes [ju] – but we all exclude the yod from appearing after certain consonants. This gives us our modern concept of the sound, which can have or not have the yod depending on environment (contrasting with the 'oo' that never has it).
Last I certainly do not think 'already since' is common in US English.
k_over_hbarc at yahoo.com
Rose Eneri said,
April 10, 2020 @ 8:14 am
I feel certain I have never made a typing mistake based on homophones. However, having been in finance/accounting most of my life, I have often had the experience of entering a string on numbers (in the early days on manual calculators, then electric, then computers) and having a feeling that a number I entered earlier in the string was wrong.
I don't know how I knew that, for example, the 10th number of 25 multi-digit numbers I entered was wrong, but I often even knew exactly what was wrong (I entered 25862 when it should have been 25962) before I went back and checked.
Rose Eneri said,
April 10, 2020 @ 8:17 am
But, I obviously have some muscle memory of some words. On my prior post, "entering a string on numbers" s/b "entering a string of numbers."
Daniel said,
April 10, 2020 @ 8:35 am
I have made errors of this sort while writing at a whiteboard while speaking at the same time (when teaching). One example is that I was thinking "How long …" in my head, and it came out my mouth more like [hɐlɔŋ], and so my fingers started writing "holl" (like the beginning of "hollow") before I caught it. As I heard myself talk, I had noticed that I had accidentally left out the rounded off-glide of "how", but it was surprising to see my fingers spelling what I said phonetically, as if they were taking dictation.
Not totally related, but something else I occasionally do in writing is to leave out the first letter of words, which I catch as I'm doing it and then have to fit it in at the beginning.
Killer said,
April 10, 2020 @ 7:18 pm
When I read the title of the post, I thought that “One I first saw” was going to be an error for “One I foresaw.”
Chris Button said,
April 11, 2020 @ 12:14 am
@ Michael Watts
I should have said "vocalically reduced" or "weak vowel" form rather than "unstressed" to avoid confusion.
I'm saying stress to refer to the fact that ['wɛn], unlike [wən], is able to be accented (and therefore also potentially attract focus–your "stress"–as the intonation nucleus). So we get:
'when ['wɛn] the (')man \/came…
vs.
when [wən] the 'man \/came…
vs.
(not if but) \when [\wɛn] the man came
@ Andrew Usher
With "stressed" being used here to refer to "nucleus bearing" then I don't think that's quite accurate. A sentence like "I didn't get one" with no special intonation/focus would be
I 'didn't \get one
However, a native Spanish speaker might for example say
I 'didn't 'get \one
and unintentionally make it sound like some contrastive focus was intended.
Michael Watts said,
April 11, 2020 @ 4:30 am
I use "stress" a little more broadly than that — what you call "focus", I called "sentence stress", not just "stress". (The idea in my mind being "stress that is assigned at the level of the sentence", as opposed to the level of the lexical word or the poetic line or what have you.)
So e.g. I believe that in poetry it would be unnatural for a beat ("stress", but not focus) to fall on the word "when". I think the word is too weak for that to happen outside of a special circumstance. I agree with (what I perceive as) your contention that, if this should occur, "when" would not use a reduced vowel.
Further developing "stress" as a concept, I have a vague belief that most English vowels can only occur in stressed syllables, and unstressed syllables necessarily use one of a small set of reduced vowels. According to this belief, the form [wɛn] is automatically stressed, as its vowel isn't reduced. So I don't see much of a distinction between "unstressed" and "vocalically reduced" — I see those as basically synonymous. I really did mean to claim that a large majority of "when"s are vocalically reduced.
All that said, these aren't strong opinions, and I'd be happy to hear more on the topic.
Philip Taylor said,
April 11, 2020 @ 6:04 am
Michael — I am no poet, but it is not difficult for me to compose verse lines in which the word "when" is stressed. Example follows, but not classified in terms of metre because I can never remember the canonical names and it would be pretentious of me to look them up just in order to use them here …
"But 'when I 'look on 'Semmer 'water
'With its 'mickle 'town and 'all
I 'cannot 'help but 'bless my 'daughter
'And her 'timely 'warning 'call."
Andrew Usher said,
April 11, 2020 @ 10:28 am
Yes, 'sentence stress' and 'focus' here refer to the same thing – (additional) stresses assigned at higher than word level. When I said (as an aside) that 'one' is normally stressed, I was thinking of its use as a number, in which it always has word stress and usually sentence stress as well. As a pronoun it indeed lacks sentence stress unless contrastive emphasis is being used, but it's still natural (not mandatory) for it to retain its full vowel, and that may be considered some level of word stress. For I agree that stress and vowel quality should be associated in English, that in unstressed syllables only some vowel phonemes occur, and there are further restrictions; though that requires more levels of stress to be recognised.
Philip Taylor:
Poetic meter is different still. Since it normally requires every other syllable to have the beat, obviously there will be more than just the words with sentence stress in those positions.I agree 'when' is certainly not out of place with metrical stress.
Philip Taylor said,
April 11, 2020 @ 10:36 am
Understood, Andrew, but I was respond to Michael's assertion regarding poetry — ' So e.g. I believe that in poetry it would be unnatural for a beat ("stress", but not focus) to fall on the word "when". '
Michael Watts said,
April 11, 2020 @ 2:26 pm
Philip Taylor, I agree that a beat falls on the word "when" in that verse, but I consider that to be a minor error on the part of the poet. (Perhaps due to language change over time, or perhaps due to sloppiness, or perhaps due to dialectal differences.)
Compare the rhyme scheme in The Tyger ("Tyger, Tyger, burning bright / in the forests of the night"), which rhymes "eye" with "symmetry". Modern audiences don't like this; it is evidence that "eye" once rhymed with "symmetry", but not evidence that the same rhyme is acceptable today.
Michael Watts said,
April 11, 2020 @ 2:50 pm
I don't think this is true at all. English meter is very free with the insertion and deletion of unstressed syllables. There's a good discussion at http://itre.cis.upenn.edu/~myl/languagelog/archives/001172.html , and I'll copy some of the scansion of Dangerous Dan McGrew here:
He 'looked like a 'man with a 'foot in the 'grave and 'scarcely the 'strength of a 'louse,
Yet he 'tilted a 'poke of 'dust on the 'bar, and he 'called for 'drinks on the 'house.
There was 'none could 'place the 'stran-ger's 'face, though we 'searched our-'selves for a 'clue
But we 'drank his 'health, and the 'last to 'drink was 'Dangerous 'Dan 'McGrew.
There's 'men that 'somehow just 'grip your 'eyes and 'hold them 'hard like a 'spell;
and 'such was 'he, and he 'looked to 'me like a 'man who had 'lived in 'hell
The rhythm of this poem comes through very strongly when read aloud (or even when read silently in your head); it's not at all forced. It consists of seven feet with a beat on the final syllable of each foot, but before the beat either one or two unstressed syllables may occur. In these six lines, all seven feet exhibit both qualities (two syllables / three syllables). And the discussion above, of the song "Skip to my Lou", provides an example of successive beats falling on two adjacent syllables.
Michael Watts said,
April 11, 2020 @ 2:51 pm
(Please ignore where I hyphenated the syllables in one line of the poem – a failure of the editing process.)
Andrew Usher said,
April 11, 2020 @ 4:02 pm
Yes, in that poem, sure. But if you read that entire post, or just have more acquaintance with poetry, you'll know that most serious poetry isn't as free in that sense. Anyway, I said 'normally', the point was not an exact description of meter but that it often forces normally weak syllables into the strong position in the foot.
It's said, actually, that 'Dan McGrew' was intentional doggerel, and that its strong but irregular meter is part of that. (And it's not as irregular as it seems if you think of it as a mixture of dactyls and trochees, like classical hexameter.)
As for the word 'when', well I'll agree that it would be less natural to stress that word. But it's not unstressable, and I don't think of putting it on the ictus as a necessary flaw. It's not like the truly unstressable syllables of English: the articles (in their ordinary use) and inflectional endings: indeed, in that post it scans a famous line as
Drink 'deep or 'taste not 'the Pi'erian 'spring (punctuation omitted for clarity)
which I could not read like that, especially as 'not' does naturally have stress. It must be:
… 'taste 'not the Pi'erian …
even if 'Pierian' gets compressed to pyeer-yan. As you mentioned it, I'd like to say my piece on the eye/symmetry issue: yes, it's supposed to rhyme. It may have been archaic already for Blake, and not allowed anymore, but it is a true rhyme. Say 'try', not 'tree', for the last of 'symmetry'
Philip Taylor said,
April 12, 2020 @ 2:54 am
Michael — "I consider that to be a minor error on the part of the poet. Well, as I was "the poet" (although I did admit that I was not one, and of course also admit that I stole the "Semmerwater" and "mickle town" from the works of a real poet), any fault in the scansion is entirely mine. But poets many order of magnitude better than I have also stressed "when" — Longfellow, for example :
and even Blake :
Andrew Usher said,
April 13, 2020 @ 7:34 pm
I note that in all those example 'when' is the first word of a line (and you really shouldn't use for this purpose examples you wrote yourself, especially if you don't make it clear). The first foot can always be weaker than the others; that's the same, presumably, as the universal tendency in our language to weaken the beginning of an utterance if it's not sentence-stressed. But due to grammar 'when' is more likely to start one.
I must also comment that in that last line there is some ambiguity between "we (see not) through the eye" and "we see (not through the eye)" – I want to read the latter because it is more pleasing, but I can't be sure from that. The modern English requirement of do-support for negations usefully eliminates this ambiguity, forcing the second reading.
Philip Taylor said,
April 14, 2020 @ 3:51 am
Sorry, I thought I did make it clear, Andrew. I wrote "it is not difficult for me to compose verse lines in which the word "when" is stressed".
Andrew Usher said,
April 14, 2020 @ 6:16 pm
Yes, I got that, but still couldn't be sure. Saying that it's possible doesn't imply that you will proceed to do that; you could just as easily have been quoting an anonymous poet. As you just hinted, 'Semmer water' and 'mickle town' are hardly to be expected in a modern English composition.
Anyway, the point established is that the word 'when' can't be considered unstressable, even when it has no contrastive emphasis. Just how much poets avoid stress on 'when' is not a question that could be easily answered.
Philip Taylor said,
April 15, 2020 @ 3:33 am
"As you just hinted, 'Semmer water' and 'mickle town' are hardly to be expected in a modern English composition" — well, neither is rhyme (terribly unfashionable !) but I have never composed poetry that does not use it …
Andrew Usher said,
April 16, 2020 @ 5:14 pm
A different thing: though rhyme (and indeed also meter, without which this discussion couldn't exist) may be unfashionable among the 'poet community' today, it's in no way archaic or unnatural – evidence (if any is needed) being its universal persistence in popular song/music.