Ask Language Log: How Unusual Are N Consecutive Monosyllables in English?

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From John Brewer:

I was recently listening to the Neil Young song "Barstool Blues" (first released 1975), which I have known and enjoyed since at least the late '80's, when I was struck by a particular line in the lyrics I didn't recall having focused on before. First I was noting the meteorological imagery, but then I noticed that it consisted entirely of monosyllables, thirteen of them in a row.

"Burn off all the fog and let the sun through to the snow."

This made me wonder how statistically improbable or unusual it was to have this long a sequence of consecutive monosyllables, with related wondering as to how that affected the chances that it had been done self-consciously by the writer or just happened without the writer noticing. I would think that LL headquarters might have access to appropriately-coded corpora resources that could address this question, with maybe even some indication as to whether unusually long strings of monosyllables are more common in some contexts or genres or registers than others.

Just to avoid apples-to-oranges comparison problems, I note that if you look at the end of the prior line and the beginning of the following line, these thirteen monosyllables are situated within a longer string of twenty. I personally find a complete semantic/syntactic unit of thirteen more striking than a string of twenty that crosses the boundaries between such units, but maybe the corpus data wouldn't bear me out on that.

I don't have time to any corpus counts this morning, but it's easy to think of other songs and poems with lots of monosyllables:

This land is your land and this land is my land
From California to the New York island
From the redwood forest to the Gulf Stream waters
This land was made for you and me

Death, be not proud, though some have called thee
Mighty and dreadful, for thou art not so;
For those whom thou think'st thou dost overthrow
Die not, poor Death, nor yet canst thou kill me.
From rest and sleep, which but thy pictures be,
Much pleasure; then from thee much more must flow,
And soonest our best men with thee do go,
Rest of their bones, and soul's delivery.
Thou art slave to fate, chance, kings, and desperate men,
And dost with poison, war, and sickness dwell,
And poppy or charms can make us sleep as well
And better than thy stroke; why swell'st thou then?
One short sleep past, we wake eternally
And death shall be no more; Death, thou shalt die.

How do I love thee? Let me count the ways.
I love thee to the depth and breadth and height
My soul can reach, when feeling out of sight
For the ends of being and ideal grace.
I love thee to the level of every day's
Most quiet need, by sun and candle-light.
I love thee freely, as men strive for right.
I love thee purely, as they turn from praise.
I love thee with the passion put to use
In my old griefs, and with my childhood's faith.
I love thee with a love I seemed to lose
With my lost saints. I love thee with the breath,
Smiles, tears, of all my life; and, if God choose,
I shall but love thee better after death.

And so on…

John added:

In my own initial googling to investigate this question, I discovered a blog post by a writer I had no prior familiarity with, discussing how back when poetry was most commonly done in Heroick Couplets of iambic pentameter, there was a point of view that it was always bad style to do a line of iambic pentameter composed of ten consecutive monosyllables.

The blogger cites Lord Shaftesbury and some of his acolytes for this point, as well as quoting a line of Pope's that seems to be alluding to the norm while violating it with presumably-deliberately-bad verse: "And ten low Words oft creep in one dull Line." I wonder, however, if the issue there is something else. Iambic pentameter contemplates that five out of every ten syllables will be unstressed, in a fixed pattern. Only a minority of monosyllabic words (generally articles, prepositions, and similar "function words") are commonly unstressed in ordinary English speech. It requires considerable skill to put together ten consecutive monosyllables where nos. 1, 3, 5, 7 & 9 all "want" to be unstressed but none of 2, 4, 6, 8 & 10 do. And in Pope's deliberately clunky line, for example, at least to my ear "low" and "dull" want to be stressed but are being stuck in prosodic slots where they shouldn't be (and maybe "one" is being slotted in where it is given a bit more stress than it wants in context). Inconsistency between the stress pattern implied by the meter and the stress pattern you would expect of the same sequence of words in ordinary speech tends to produce bad verse. This would imply that both in ordinary speech or prose, as well as in song lyrics (where matching up the flow of syllables to the underlying musical rhythm can be much freer than in old-timey poetry), it should be less challenging to produce a natural-sounding string of monosyllables of any given length.

I think this gets the principles (and goals) of much English accentual-syllable verse wrong. In particular, much (even most) creators of iambic pentameter shun as "doggerel" the kind of verse rhythm that forces itself on the reader, and aim instead for subtler and less obvious patterns.  See here for some further discussion, including this:

In the English ballad meter, the basic idea seems to be that "strong" positions in the meter should coincide with single syllables that are "peaks" of linguistic stress, in the sense that they are naturally more prominent than the syllables around them. The weak positions in this meter are relatively unconstrained, and in particular may correspond to different numbers of syllables with different stress properties, depending on the poet (or the poem). The result is verse in which the natural rhythm of linguistic performance strongly evokes the metrical form.

In English iambic pentameter, on the other hand, the basic constraints seems to be that both strong and weak positions in the meter should correspond to single syllables, and that "weak" positions in the meter should not coincide with stress peaks (that is, syllables that are naturally more prominent than those around them). The "strong" positions are relatively unconstrained. The result is verse in which the natural rhythm of linguistic performance, while metrically constrained, need not evoke the regular alternation of the metrical form very strongly.

That (I think generally unproblematic) account of iambic pentameter means that sequences of monosyllables are no problem, at least from a strictly metrical perspective. Of course, there are other reasons for including two- and three-syllable words in songs and poems, starting from the fact that lots of the commonest words are polysyllabic.

Update — Boolos, George. "Gödel's second incompleteness theorem explained in words of one syllable." Mind (1994): 1-3:

First of all, when I say "proved", what I will mean is "proved with the aid of the whole of math". Now then: two plus two is four, as you well know. And, of course, it can be proved that two plus two is four (proved, that is, with the aid of the whole of math, as I said, though in the case of two plus two, of course we do not need the whole of math to prove that it is four). And, as may not be quite so clear, it can be proved that it can be proved that two plus two is four, as well. And it can be proved that it can be proved that it can be proved that two plus two is four. And so on. In fact, if a claim can be proved, then it can be proved that the claim can be proved. And that too can be proved.

Now: two plus two is not five. And it can be proved that two plus two is not five. And it can be proved that it can be proved that two plus two is not five, and so on.

Thus: it can be proved that two plus two is not five. Can it be proved as well that two plus two is five? It would be a real blow to math, to say the least, if it could. If it could be proved that two plus two is five, then it could be proved that five is not five, and then there would be no claim that could not be proved, and math would be a lot of bunk.

So, we now want to ask, can it be proved that it can't be proved that two plus two is five? Here's the shock: no, it can't. Or to hedge a bit: if it can be proved that it can't be proved that two plus two is five, then it can be proved as well that two plus two is five, and math is a lot of bunk. In fact, if math is not a lot of bunk, then no claim of the form "claim X can't be proved" can be proved.

So, if math is not a lot of bunk, then, though it can't be proved that two plus two is five, it can't be proved that it can't be proved that two plus two is five.

By the way, in case you'd like to know: yes, it can be proved that if it can be proved that it can't be proved that two plus two is five, then it can be proved that two plus two is five.

[h/t/ Alec Marantz]

 



44 Comments

  1. Peter C said,

    February 2, 2021 @ 10:16 am

    The world is too much with us—late and soon,
    Black rain, and fire, and hail will burst: oh hear!
    I have walked out in rain and back in rain,
    Ere half my days, in this dark world and wide,
    Not as a god, but as a god might be.
    He did not touch the shroud, or raise the fold
    That hid my face, or take my hand in his
    As he went out and in to fetch the cows.
    Love is not all; it is not meat nor drink.

    A few quibbles:

    1.) In the first line of the Donne sonnet, "called" is disyllabic, not monosyllabic.

    2.) The explanation of ballad meter and iambic pentameter that Mark quotes is, indeed, generally unproblematic–but not *entirely* unproblematic. It's entirely acceptable in IP for the meter to be varied so that nominally weak positions in the meter do coincide with stress peaks–most obviously in the substitution of a trochaic rhythm for an iambic one at the start of a line or immediately following a caesura, as in Coleridge's "shining icicles / Quietly shining to the quiet moon."

    [(myl) The usual current idea about that is that the notion of "stress maximum" requires comparison to syllables on both sides, and so a line-initial weak position can't be a violation, thus allowing line-initial inversion in iambic meters.]

  2. john burke said,

    February 2, 2021 @ 10:37 am

    Fifty-some years ago, an English major of my acquaintance was incensed by a line in a song by Donovan Leitch which mentioned “the dark, foreboDING skies” because “foreboding” in the text coincided with an anapest in the rhythm of the song. I learned the term “declamation” to refer to this matching of stressed text syllables with musical tress, so the Donovan line was an example of bad declamation because the two elements were at cross purposes. Did I misunderstand, or misuse, the term? Is that what’s meant by “"strong" positions in the meter should coincide with single syllables that are "peaks" of linguistic stress”?

  3. Robert Coren said,

    February 2, 2021 @ 10:54 am

    Just to nitpick a bit: the meter requires "called" in the first line of the Donne sonnet to be two syllables, and in Donne's day I'm fairly sure it would have been written "call'd" if it had been intended to be monosyllabic.

  4. Morten Jonsson said,

    February 2, 2021 @ 10:59 am

    In the first line of Donne's "Death, Be Not Proud" I'd say that "called" is two syllables. If it's one, the stress in "called thee" would be on "called," creating a feminine ending. And I don't think even Donne would rhyme on the unstressed syllable. Just a side note.

    [(myl) You (and the others who noticed this) are correct — I removed the boldface from that line… Thanks for the correction!]

    I do think sequences of monosyllables can be a problem metrically. It's what makes Dr. Seuss hard to read aloud sometimes–when you have long strings of words where any one could be stressed, the beat can get lost.

    Keats, in Hyperion, wanting to suggest extreme stillness, piles up the monosyllables.

    Forest on forest hung about his head
    Like cloud on cloud. No stir of air was there,
    Not so much life as on a summer's day
    Robs not one light seed from the feather'd grass,
    But where the dead leaf fell, there did it rest.

    Two of the last four lines are made up entirely of monosyllables. I think he's taking Pope's lesson here, deliberately making the lines creep along, using an effect characteristic of bad verse for his own purposes. It's not just that the phrases are metrically ambiguous. It's that if you try to read them with any definite stress they sound unnatural. "Robs not one light seed" is the most extreme–five consecutive syllables of pretty much equal weight.

    [(myl) But sometimes monosyllable sequences do trip along pretty lightly, e.g.

    Just the place for a Snark! I have said it thrice:
    What I tell you three times is true.

    ]

  5. Philip Taylor said,

    February 2, 2021 @ 11:21 am

    I think a lot of times long past,
    when days were long and nights not cold,
    when Spring with dew would deck the grass,
    And sun would light the far-off wold.

    The days of youth, when love was bliss,
    and loss was not a thing we knew.
    Those were the days I loved the best
    but now they've gone, far out of view.

    If I seem sad, grieve not for me
    For all this earth is wracked with woe —
    My life means naught when seen up close:
    A youth long spent — 'tis time to go !

    [96 monosyllables, in what I think is iambic tetrameter — but I am no poet, so I may well be wrong !).

  6. J.W. Brewer said,

    February 2, 2021 @ 11:37 am

    Thanks for posting this. I think I may have muddled up the clarity of my initial question by adding as a perhaps unnecessary detour the separate point on Shaftesbury's theories of good/bad style in iambic pentameter. The point where I was hoping corpus linguistics might be useful is this: it seems intuitively obvious that all-monosyllable lines (maybe "units" would be a better word as I address below) will become less and less common as syllable-count increases. All-monosyllable units of 13 or 14 words will almost certainly be rarer than those of 8 or 10 (viewed as a percentage of all units with that many syllables). What I am curious about is the shape of that tail, i.e. how steep or shallow is the drop-off as total syllable-count increases. Which may be mixed up with the question of how long a string of monosyllables can plausibly be generated without the speaker or writer self-consciously trying to avoid non-monosyllables.

    As to line v. "unit," I realized on further reflection that the "line" from Barstool Blues that caught my attention is more less the sort of unit in standard ballad form that has come to be conventionally printed as two lines. It's equivalent to e.g. "Because I could not stop for death, he kindly stopped for me" or "There were three men came out of the west, their fortunes for to try." All-monosyllable lines of pentameter are easy to find, as shown above, but a little cursory poking around at ballad-type texts didn't quickly turn up any all-monosyllable "units" of that size, until I went way way back before Edmund Spenser.

    Sternhold & Hopkins' "The Whole Booke of Psalmes Collected Into Englishe Metre," published 1562, turns out to have multiple fourteen-monosyllable examples of that sort of ballad-meter unit. E.g. (and this is a smallish sample),

    As with a bit I will keep fast
    my mouth with force and might,

    and

    Yea, though I walk in vale of death,
    yet will I fear no ill:

    But Sternhold & Hopkins' versions were roundly condemned by subsequent generations on stylistic grounds as clunky doggerel. A very brief (probably not enough to be statistically valid) dip into S&H's eventual successor as the standard C. of E. metrical psalter (Tate & Brady, 1696) spotted notably fewer fourteen monosyllable units, although I did catch one, viz.:

    Lord, let me know my term of days,
    how soon my life will end;

    So my question is now more or less just how unusual is an all-monosyllable unit of that approximate length in texts written in that last century or so (and not written in a self-consciously archaic style and/or other markedly-odd style*). How much of an outlier in more modern style is

    Burn off all the fog and let
    The sun through to the snow?.

    *Dr. Seuss is an example of markedly-odd style that I heard echoed this very morning by a first-grade teacher teaching remotely over the internet and dictating (for writing practice) sentences that were obviously and self-consciously composed solely of monosyllables because of the intended audience. I think "The wings of the bug are pink" was one of the sentences used.

    [(myl) I was going to quote from Green Eggs and Ham and Fox in Socks, but restrained myself…]

  7. Jack said,

    February 2, 2021 @ 11:49 am

    Here are 7, then 11, then 10, then another 7 before you finally get a non-monosyllable:

    Born down in a dead man's town
    The first kick I took was when I hit the ground
    End up like a dog that's been beat too much
    Till you spend half your life just coverin' up now
    Born in the U.S.A.

  8. Scott P. said,

    February 2, 2021 @ 12:19 pm

    History of the United States in Words of One Syllable:

    https://www.amazon.com/History-United-States-Words-Syllable/dp/B002JHSYY6

    Ever since seeing this as a young boy in a history museum display case, I've always wondered how they pulled it off. How do you refer to Thomas Jefferson or Abraham Lincoln? Tom? Abe?

  9. Stephen Hart said,

    February 2, 2021 @ 12:22 pm

    "the chances that it had been done self-consciously by the writer or just happened without the writer noticing"

    I suggest self-consciously, as the next line also has 13 beats:

    let me see your face a gain be fore I have to go

    (immediately after Burn off all the fog and let the sun through to the snow"

  10. Charles in Toronto said,

    February 2, 2021 @ 12:28 pm

    But if you asked me to
    I just might change my mind
    And let you in my life, forever
    If you asked me to
    I just might give my heart
    And stay here in your arms forever
    If you asked me to
    If you asked me to

    The contrast of "forever" being the only polysyllabic word in this classic song chorus is notable.

  11. John Walden said,

    February 2, 2021 @ 12:58 pm

    For I have sworn thee fair, and thought thee bright,
    Who art as black as hell, as dark as night.

    (Shakespeare manages twenty)

  12. Allen W Thrasher said,

    February 2, 2021 @ 1:35 pm

    I notice that in the initial examples there are a fair number of bisyllabic words and very few of three or four syllables. A hasty and statistically uniformed look at The New Oxford Book of English Verse gives me the impression that words of three or more syllables are more frequent in many poets than in the initial examples, especially in poems in pentameter. It is not surprising that it would be harder to fit longer words in trimeter or tetrameter lines.

    Anyway, this might be something interesting to investigate to those who have access to corpora plus the skills to use them.

  13. Karen Hart said,

    February 2, 2021 @ 1:55 pm

    This post started with a Neil Young song. Listening to the song one can hear throughout a clear pattern of 8 beats per line:

    Burn off—all the—fog and—let the—sun through—to the—snow—rest

    In many songs (like this one) the rhythm of the words (or syllables) is fitted to the rhythm of the music. Therefore the rhythm of the words in a song is different in important ways from rhythm of words in poetry, prose or conversation.

  14. Karen Hart said,

    February 2, 2021 @ 2:07 pm

    This post started with a Neil Young song. Listening to the song one can hear throughout a clear pattern of 8 beats per line:

    Burn off—all the—fog and—let the—sun through—to the—snow—(rest)

    In many songs (like this one) the rhythm of the words (or syllables) is fitted to the rhythm of the music. Therefore the rhythm of the words in a song is different in important ways from rhythm of words in poetry, prose or conversation.

  15. Nick Montfort said,

    February 2, 2021 @ 2:11 pm

    There are a good number of examples where a poem is all or almost all monosyllables. Tichborne's Elegy has only one two-syllable word in its 18 lines — “fallen” — which makes the rest of the monosyllables even nicer from my standpoint:

    https://poetryarchive.org/poem/tichbornes-elegy/

    There are also those who wrote monosyllabic literary texts, including very extensive ones, intentionally. Mary Godolphin is the major figure here, see for instance her *Robinson Crusoe in Words of One Syllable*:

    https://www.gutenberg.org/files/6936/6936-h/6936-h.htm

  16. Jerry Friedman said,

    February 2, 2021 @ 3:04 pm

    J. W. Brewer: I'd try to help, but I have no idea how to search a corpus for monosyllables.
    Are there any corpora whose words are tagged for syllable count?

    [(myl) Not that I know of, but there's pretty good software for syllable-division, e.g. https://spacy.io/universe/project/spacy_syllables .]

    Peter C: Nice cento. There's room for plenty more, such as "Here rests his head upon the lab of earth."

    Philip Taylor: Well done. Yes, it's iambic tetrameter.

    john burke: There's a big difference between fitting words to a tune, where the accents should match (except in Mexican popular songs?), and English iambic meter, where flexibility is encouraged.

    John Walden: Also

    So long as men can breathe or eyes can see,
    So long lives this, and this gives life to thee.

    Life's but a walking shadow, a poor player
    That struts and frets his hour upon the stage
    And then is heard no more; it is a tale
    Told by an
    idiot, full of sound and fury,
    Signifying nothing.

  17. Y said,

    February 2, 2021 @ 3:21 pm

    Much of the Beatles' early work:

    Love, love me, do
    You know I love you
    I'll always [d'oh!] be true
    So please love me do

  18. J.W. Brewer said,

    February 2, 2021 @ 4:05 pm

    Y's "d'oh!" illustrates one of my impressions that is driving my curiosity here. It is quite easy to find "units" of the length I'm interested in in which all but one of the words are monosyllables. For example, a well-known Dylan song has multiple examples, such as

    Helped her out of a jam, I guess,
    But I used a little [d'oh!] too much force

    and

    But I never [d'oh!] did like it all that much
    And one day the ax just fell

    It's obviously possible to construct longer monosyllable-only sequences, such as the Shakespeare ones, if one is willing to do it self-consciously and work in a register that sounds artificial. One of the things that struck me about the Neil Young example was that it sounds reasonably natural/vernacular/conversational in a way that not only the Shakespeare but the all-monosyllables-except-for-"forever" example don't. So my working hypothesis is that it's pretty easy to come up with natural-sounding units of approximately fourteen syllables, give or take, with only one non-monosyllable, but there's some sort of barrier in getting from one to zero that's hard to get past without self-consciousness and artificiality. Maybe Neil got past it by dumb luck, because doing so naturally is statistically improbable not statistically impossible. The Springsteen example confirms that somewhat shorter lines that sound natural are easier to do, and if you want you can stick three such shorter lines of monosyllables in a row, but I don't think any of those lines naturally combine into a larger syntactic unit. If you said them all in conversation in the same discourse some other transitional stuff would probably have come in between.

    FWIW, I did find an academic Dylanologist (Steven Rings of the U. of Chicago) who seemed to claim that Dylan had done a ballad-form unit with sixteen consecutive monosyllables, but upon closer inspection his methodology seemed suspect. The unit in question is given on Dylan's own website as:

    She can take the dark out of the nighttime
    And paint the daytime black

    Prof. Rings, however, quoted it while respelling "nighttime" as "night time" and ditto with "daytime."

    That said, that same search led me by free association to a truly impressive (because not all that artificial-sounding) nineteen-monosyllable couplet by Amy Rigby (from her song whose premise is that it's an email to Dylan from Philip Roth on the occasion of the former winning the Nobel Prize and the latter being passed over again):

    And all the time and the tears and blood
    Were like a stream that flows free from the mud

    Separately to Jerry Friedman's point, I have no idea if corpora exist that are appropriately tagged to allow N-consecutive-monosyllable sequences to be detected, but the reason for my inquiry was the suspicion that if such corpora do exist Mark Liberman would know about them.

  19. Daniel Barkalow said,

    February 2, 2021 @ 4:54 pm

    On page 302 of Le Ton beau de Marot, Douglas Hofstadter includes an explanation of special relativity entirely in monosyllables (and, incidentally, not using any latinate roots).

  20. Bob Ladd said,

    February 2, 2021 @ 4:55 pm

    This is only very slightly off-topic. In all of these strings of monosyllables, there are lots of "unstressed" words or pairs of words that demand weak-strong or strong-weak prosody. (Obviously, this applies to all the classical iambic pentameter lines quoted, otherwise you wouldn't have iambs.)
    Anyway, Dwight Bolinger always used to maintain that so-called "stress timing" in English reflected nothing more than the tendency for lots of syllables to be reduced, and that if you worked at it you could put together sequences of syllables that couldn't be reduced, yielding, in effect, syllable-timed rhythm. His masterpiece in this department was this:

    "Jane's pet chimpanzee Nimrod dotes on fresh horehound drops."

    (How many readers even know what horehound is?)

    Anyway, I expect that some LgLog reader can do better than Bolinger's 13-syllable effort.

  21. Y said,

    February 2, 2021 @ 5:24 pm

    Also: "Of all the gin joints in all the towns in all the world she walks into mine."

  22. David Marjanović said,

    February 2, 2021 @ 5:51 pm

    History of the United States in Words of One Syllable: […] I've always wondered how they pulled it off.

    Lots of prez and veep, I bet…

    That struts and frets his hour upon the stage
    And then is heard no more; it is a tale
    Told by an

    6 monosyllables, then upon, then 15 monosyllables.

  23. Batchman said,

    February 2, 2021 @ 7:06 pm

    Computer scientist Guy Steele once gave a talk on programming language construction that started with all words of one syllable and then built upon those words as it went along, introducing each multisyllable word by defining it in terms of previously used/defined words. The intent was to illustrate how a language can be developed from basic components and then extended using those same components.

    You can find the talk here:

    https://www.cs.virginia.edu/~evans/cs655/readings/steele.pdf

  24. Morten Jonsson said,

    February 2, 2021 @ 7:07 pm

    @Bob Ladd

    I do know what horehound is. I like it, but I’m in a small but enlightened minority there.

    I read the first six syllables of Bolinger’s example as iambic—if “chimpanzee” is pronounced with the emphasis on “pan”—and if “fresh” is changed to a two-syllable word like “musty” or “brownish,” the whole line is a perfect fourteener. I’m reading it in a verse context, but don’t see any way to read it without some differentiation of stress ((whatever we mean by stress). “Nimrod” and “horehound” are not perfect spondees, for example. They’re actually trochees, to my ear. The first stroke in each of them comes down just a little harder.

  25. maidhc said,

    February 2, 2021 @ 7:30 pm

    Y's suggestion of the early Beatles made me think of this interesting example:

    Last night I said these words to my girl
    I know you
    never even try, girl
    Come on…
    Please please me, whoa yeah, like I please you
    You don't need me to show the way, love
    Why do I
    always have to say, love
    Come on…
    Please please me, whoa yeah, like I please you

    But on the bridge we go more polysyllabic, particularly on the stressed words.:

    I don't wanna sound complaining
    But you know there's always rain in my heart (In my heart)
    I do all the
    pleasing with you, it's so hard to reason
    With you, whoah yeah, why do you make me blue

    To my ear, these early Beatles songs, like also "Love Me Do", have a definite Buddy Holly influence. Some Holly songs, like "Peggy Sue", definitely do the monosyllable effect, while others ("Rave On") don't. Also Holly-related songs like Sonny Curtis's "I Fought the Law".

    It's a challenge to find examples of that monosyllabic style in the works of other early Beatle influences like Chuck Berry and Little Richard. You get more of a feel like

    "Early in the morning I'ma giving you the warning don't you step on my blue suede shoes"

    or

    "I saw Uncle John with bald-headed Sally,
    He saw Aunt Mary coming and he ducked back in the alley"

    I hope I didn't mess up the tags, that's challenging.

  26. Allen Riddell said,

    February 2, 2021 @ 8:33 pm

    Paul Samuelson's 1979 dismissal of the Kelly Criterion in the Journal of Banking and Finance: http://www-stat.wharton.upenn.edu/~steele/Courses/434/434Context/Kelly%20Resources/Samuelson1979.pdf

    Written using one-syllable words. Here's the abstract: "He who acts in N plays to make his mean log of wealth as big as it can be made will, with odds that go to one as N soars, beat me who acts to meet my own tastes for risk."

  27. Gabriel Holbrow said,

    February 2, 2021 @ 9:20 pm

    @Scott P., as I recall from browsing in History of the United States in Words of One Syllable, which I pulled off the shelf in my bibliophile aunt's house when I was a teenager, proper nouns and other key polysyllabic were written with hyphens, as in "Wash-ing-ton was the first pres-i-dent." It was on the whole unreadable, and made a deep impression on me with the lesson that shorter words are not necessarily easier to understand.

  28. Jerry Friedman said,

    February 2, 2021 @ 11:56 pm

    David Marjanović: Thanks, I don't know how I missed "upon". I don't suppose I can get away with "up on"?

    To make up for it:

    I am no orator, as Brutus is;
    But, as you know me all, a plain blunt man,
    That love my friend; and that they know full well
    That gave me
    public leave to speak of him:

    And it is now my task to find more, to keep on, not to give up. Yes, I am

    Made weak by time and fate, but strong in will
    To strive, to seek, to find, and not to yield.

  29. Jerry Friedman said,

    February 2, 2021 @ 11:56 pm

    David Marjanović: Thanks, I don't know how I missed "upon". I don't suppose I can get away with "up on"?

    To make up for it:

    I am no orator, as Brutus is;
    But, as you know me all, a plain blunt man,
    That love my friend; and that they know full well
    That gave me
    public leave to speak of him:

    And it is now my task to find more, to keep on, not to give up. Yes, I am

    Made weak by time and fate, but strong in will
    To strive, to seek, to find, and not to yield.

  30. David Morris said,

    February 3, 2021 @ 3:04 am

    Many hymns have multiple lines of 6, 7 or 8 single-syllable words in a row, with maybe one bi- or poly-syllable.

    Amazing grace! How sweet the sound
    that saved a wretch like me.
    I once was lost, but now am found,
    was blind but now I see.

    springs to mind. It would be possible to change the first two words to eg 'O grace of God! to make an entirely monosyllabic verse.

  31. Stephen Goranson said,

    February 3, 2021 @ 4:52 am

    Matthew Arnold here starts of mono-syllabically (the others for emphasis of long-ness?), but I have a question.

    "Once read thine own breast right,/ And thou hast done with fears;/ Man gets no other light,/ Search he a thousand years."
    Empedocles on Etna.

    What is the tense of "read"?

  32. Philip Taylor said,

    February 3, 2021 @ 6:30 am

    I would suggest "past tense", since if MA had intended otherwise, would he not have written "Read once thine own breast right" ?

  33. ardj said,

    February 3, 2021 @ 10:40 am

    @ Stephen Goranson

    Pace Phillip Taylor, I suggest that ‘read’ is present tense. If not constrained by writing clumsy verse, Arnold would have written: ‘If you read your own breast / heart/ soul correctly your fears will vanish.’ ‘Once’ is there for emphasis (you need only do this once to understand clearly), not as an adverb of time.

  34. Jerry Friedman said,

    February 3, 2021 @ 10:48 am

    Sorry about my double post above.

    "Read" there can't be indicative, either past or present, because the subject is "thou", so it would end in -st. It's imperative or subjunctive, or whatever you call a combination of the two if you don't distinguish. The syntax is the same as in "Give him an inch and he takes a mile."

  35. ardj said,

    February 3, 2021 @ 11:45 am

    @ Morten Jonsson

    It seems rather old-fashioned to stress ‘pan’ in chimpanzee in ordinary modern English. If I were versifying these lines:

    Jane’s pet chimpanzee Nimrod
    Dotes on fresh horehound drops

    – I would hear them as sprung rhythm, or just accentual verse, with main stresses on
    Jane – chimp – Nim –rod, and
    Dotes – fresh – hore – drops
    – but if you want to stress ‘pan’, it works just as well.

  36. ardj said,

    February 3, 2021 @ 1:08 pm

    @Jerry Friedman

    I wondered about agreement, and imperative could work, but your analogy is a bit confusing – surely, to match Arnold’s line, it should be “give him an inch and he has taken an ell" ? Still, it’s not something to go to the stake for.

    Arnold is a careless writer – consider the syntax of this verse, for instance, where either ‘and’ is missing after ‘when here’, or ‘as’ is needed before ‘when here’, or ‘so that’ is needed before ‘’we come near’ (not to mention his confusing use of commas):

    Born into life! — we bring
    A bias with us here,
    And, when here, each new thing
    Affects us we come near;
    To tunes we did not call our being must keep chime.

    And the unsatisfactory scansion of lines such as
    Still hungrier for delight as delights grow more rare,

    or in the last line of:
    Not much, I know, you prize
    What pleasures may be had,
    Who look on life with eyes
    Estranged, like mine, and sad:
    And yet the village-churl feels the truth more than you
    (reminiscent of Hopkins clumsiness in the last line of 'Margaret are you grieving')

    or just confusing himself with
    What were the wise man's plan?

    And in the line in question, as elsewhere, I tend to see Arnold switching from ‘thou’ to ‘you when it suits him;

    Arnold is certainly pretty consistent in matching ‘thou’ with ‘shalt’, &c, in his portentous archaizing, but I think that in the line we are talking about he just gets muddled again.

  37. Chris Button said,

    February 3, 2021 @ 11:30 pm

    @ Morten Jonsson

    I’m reading it in a verse context, but don’t see any way to read it without some differentiation of stress ((whatever we mean by stress).

    Outside of phonetic parameters around length and loudness (not so much pitch since the dominant control there is intonation):

    Stressed syllable in English: Needs a full vowel
    Unstressed syllable in English: Can be reduced to schwa (but not always)

    As a result "stress-timed language" is a misleading term. For example, Mandarin is not usually called a stress-timed language. And yet:

    Stressed syllable in Mandarin: Needs a full tone
    Unstressed syllable in Mandarin: Can have a neutral tone (but not always)

  38. Jerry Friedman said,

    February 4, 2021 @ 12:10 am

    ardj: Lots of points to address.

    "Have taken" isn't analogous to "hast done". "Have done" was an idiom. The OED defines "have done with" as "To cease to have dealings with, to finish with; to desist, cease." As far as I can tell, it's the same as the American English "be done". So the quotation means "Read your own breast right, and you finish with fears." I think "You are finished with fears" or "You're done with fears" would be better.

    I read the "Born into life" lines as "And, when here, each new thing we come near affects us", with an inversion of word order to fit the rhyme and meter. "That" is optional in that construction.

    The "Still hungrier" has an ordinary substitution of a pyrrhic and a spondee for two iambs. You can find that in any poet back to Shakespeare.

    "When in disgrace with fortune and men's eyes"

    "Singest of summer in full-throated ease."

    And since I quoted Tennyson's "Ulysses" before,

    "A bringer of new things, and vile it were"

    The "village-churl" line has a pattern that's much more anomalous for the time, with a trochee that's not at the beginning of a line or after a pause. I had to look for a while before I found one in FitzGerald's Rubaiyat:

    "And one by one back in the closet lays."

    And in that the reversed foot is followed by an iamb, not by a spondee as in Arnold's line.

    :"What were the wise man's plan?" should mean "What would the wise man's plan be?" but I agree that I don't see why "were" fits there, why it isn't "What is the wise man's plan?" Maybe it's a compressed way of saying "If we were wise men, what would our plan be?"

    (I don't know what your objection to the last line of Hopkins's "Spring and Fall" is.)

    I searched for "you" and didn't see any place where Arnold had switched from "thou" to "you". We'll have to disagree on the original question about "Once read thy own breast right".

    I also disagree on Arnold's carelessness. He set himself a very hard task, writing a good-sized philosophical closet drama in rhyme and meter, and I'm not going to claim he was equal to it, but I don't think the problems are from carelessness.

  39. Michael Watts said,

    February 4, 2021 @ 9:41 am

    Dr. Seuss is an example of markedly-odd style that I heard echoed this very morning by a first-grade teacher teaching remotely over the internet and dictating (for writing practice) sentences that were obviously and self-consciously composed solely of monosyllables because of the intended audience. I think "The wings of the bug are pink" was one of the sentences used.

    Hmm. I suspect you have a real observation, but you haven't identified what it is. "The wings of the bug are pink" can't be an example of a sentence which is self-consciously composed of monosyllables because of an assumption that the audience is stupid. That kind of awkwardness from a strange assumption about the audience happens all the time, but the most default version of that sentence — "the bug's wings are pink" — is also composed solely of monosyllables.

    The theory would have to be one of (1) "first-graders cannot understand possessive forms such as my"; (2) '"the wings of the bug are pink" appears in that form for good reasons such as better discourse flow'; or (3) "I want to change something to express my belief that first-graders have difficulty understanding spoken English, but the change will be chosen at random since, in fact, they don't".

    Jane's pet chimpanzee Nimrod dotes on horehound drops.

    This is really interesting. I agree with someone above that Nimrod and horehound have trochaic stress patterns. My feeling of the *timing* is different — my reading of this sentence gives me the gut feeling that the syllables "Nim", "on", "hore", and "hound" experience some sort of timing reduction compared to the others. The first two syllables of "chimpanzee" are more ambiguous; maybe full, maybe less than full.

    In terms of more conventional "reduction" in English, it seems to me that "on" is likely to be reduced, and in fact this reduction is often obligatory. Since the example seeks to avoid reduction, why not "bites horehound drops" or the like?

    I interpret my feelings about this sentence as weak support for a different theory I read on the concepts of "stress-timed" and "syllable-timed" as applied to English, which came to the conclusion that it was mostly about consonant clustering. The English example used there was "Smith's strength crunched six sleek ships", which I have to agree is pretty hard to get through without an unusual amount of focus on each individual syllable.

  40. J.W. Brewer said,

    February 4, 2021 @ 12:17 pm

    @Michael Watts: I don't think first-grade teachers are proceeding on the assumption that their students are stupid rather than the assumption that their students are novices when it comes to reading and writing, which is not at all the same thing. What makes the "bug" sentence marked in large part is the use of "bug" rather than "insect" (or a more precise word like "butterfly" or "beetle") which is a much more appropriate term for classroom register, or at least it will be once the kids are a few years older. You use the more colloquial and unscientific term "bug" when your students are at a stage where the presumed challenge of writing a disyllablic six-letter word is still significantly greater than that of writing a three-letter monosyllable.

    That said, while the all-monosyllable style dates back to at least the era of Dr. Seuss and the Dick and Jane books, I'm not sure how well-supported it is with empirical research, in other words I'm not sure that disaster in achieving literacy would ensue if disyllables were mixed in earlier than they apparently are. Obviously disyllables are used in other threshold-of-literacy contexts, where A is for apple and Z is for zebra etc., so why not in running prose.

  41. ardj said,

    February 4, 2021 @ 6:14 pm

    @Jerry Friedman

    Thank you for this courteous reply – and although I disagree with parts of what you say, I am not going to argue the tense of the breast examination further. However

    1. Born into life! &c.
    – first I apologize for introducing a semi-colon after ‘near’ in my transcription – no idea how, but misleading and maybe accounts for your approach. The correct text (if my source is correct) is:

    Born into life! — we bring
    A bias with us here,
    And, when here, each new thing
    Affects us we come near;
    To tunes we did not call our being must keep chime.

    – as I read it, in this stanza, ‘when’ controls everything up to ‘call’. A prose version of the last part might be “when each new thing that affects us here brings us near to tunes we did not call, our being must attune itself to them”. I agree that the commas work against this reading, as do missing conjunctions, &c, but it is the only sense I can make of the overall combination of words.

    2. ‘Still hungrier for delights as delights grow more rare’

    – I do not quarrel with your description of the scansion: on the contrary that scansion is what I object to. Given that the first ‘delight’ is stressed and thus lifted up as something to be revelled in, abasing the second with a flat lack of stress undercuts the effect and diminishes the delights, when surely the rarity makes them more piercing in the poet’s view.

    3. Turning to the wisdom to be found in the unthinking bucolic, I regret to disagree about the scansion.

    And yet the village-churl feels the truth more than you

    The first half is three iambs, but the second half is la-di-dah dah-di-dah – no doubt there is a name for it but I have forgot my Latin. Of course you could say it is trochee -spondee-iamb if you wanted, although that does not accord with the sense; but the fact remains that in this particular hexameter the second half flatly contradicts the smooth rhythm of the first half – and indeed of all the hexameters as far as I can see. Is it the churlishness that provokes such rude discomfort or the author’s carelessness ?

    (For what it is worth, there is effectively a pause before the trochee. And Hopkins is for another day, as I foolishly forgot the second half of the poem. I agree with you about the actual last line, no problem there, it’s And yet you will weep … that bugs me.)

    4. you – thou: I entirely agree, and thought to have averred as much, that Arnold does not muddle archaic pronoun with modern verb ending (or vice versa). What I note is that he switches from addressing Pausanias as ‘thou’ to saying ‘you’ with no, well, rhyme or reason that I can see, except that ‘you’ sometimes makes for easier versification. So I suggested that, in the lines that started all this:
    "Once read thine own breast right,/ And thou hast done with fears”

    – Arnold loses his way half-way through the line. But I do not want to labour the point.
    And thank you for making me think a bit harder about it all, even if I am less convinced of the worth of Arnold’s endeavour and still less of the outcome that you are.

  42. Stephen Goranson said,

    February 5, 2021 @ 9:33 am

    Thank you all for three different readings of "read" in Empedocles on Etna.

    Upon my *rereading* "read," though past or present indicative were my first two guesses (in whichever order from years ago, I don't recall), the next line after "a thousand years" is:
    "Sink in thyself! there ask what ails thee, at that shrine!
    That, imo, helps the argument for imperative.

  43. Jerry Friedman said,

    February 6, 2021 @ 2:43 pm

    ardj: Just a quick note. Sorry I was unclear. I think all the instances of "you" in the poem are addressed to the gods.

    I was not tempted to do more than glance through the poem.

    Thank you for the interesting discussion.

  44. Mike C said,

    February 6, 2021 @ 6:59 pm

    "Old man, take a look at my life, I'm a lot like you"

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