So Nothing Rhymes with Orange?

Lessons from a master rhymer

A masterclass in making it look easy.

Hello,

Well, the last few topics have been more serious than usual and what with everything else here’s something lighter.

1. I have three new tracks out on streaming services (Spotify, Apple, YouTube Music) and now on Bandcamp, too: I Belong and 2 versions of The Space Between. They’re rather peaceful, I think. More about these later.

2. What with the Artemis II excellence, I shared some moon sketches this week: moon sketches on Instagram

3. Maybe you, like me, heard that there are no words that rhyme with orange or chimney. From time to time, I’ve wondered at this. For orange, I got as far as lozenge, which I don’t think is bad, but beyond that, it’s not clear to me what works. Eminem put me straight.

Wishing you a great week,

Jono

In a short segment on the 60 mins show, Eminem said,

“People say that the word orange doesn’t rhyme with anything, and that kind of pisses me off because I can think of a lot of things that rhyme with orange.”

“If you’re taking the word at face value and you just say orange, nothing is going to rhyme with it exactly. If you enunciate it and you make it more than one syllable, or-range, you could say:

I put my orange, four-inch door hinge in storage and ate porridge with George.”

I love that the general incompetence at rhyming kind of pisses him off.

It’s all in how you say it. So, if you need practice (or convincing) before relating this to anyone else, I recommend watching the 2-minute clip yourself.

With how easy he makes it I figured I should try with chimney. I got this far:

Climbing the chim-ney, in the city, I scraped my flimsy, right knee, when I saw a big bee, getting all filthy, and making me dizzy.

Hmm. Eminem is impressive. Got any good rhymes for chimney?

Related Ideas to Rhyme with Orange

Also see:

• The rhyme as reason effect

• Ablaut reduplication (flip-flop, not flop-flip)

• Chiasmus — Fail to prepare, prepare to fail

• Pleonasm — An unexpected surprise

• Ordering adjectives — a great green dragon, not a green great one

• Collective nouns — a shush of librarians

• Everyone’s a geek about something

• And related to oranges somewhat: Mandarins, clementines, satsumas, tangerines??

PS if you haven’t listened to it, you might enjoy the podcast episode we did with Mark Forsyth on all things language like these: Ordering adjectives with Mark Forsyth