I don't like people to get the idea that I have to do this for a living

[sovay]

fleurdelis28 said on Facebook, "Today's tongue-twister: 'Proper platypus plural.'"

I said, "'All I want is a proper plural platypus . . .'"

She said, "I think this may need to be a song."

That was on Wednesday.

I walked home tonight from Lexington Center.

By the time I was turning up my street, I had nearly six lines out of ten and all the end-rhymes for the following:

All I want is a proper plural platypus
Keep your platypuses and your platypi
Let the monotreme decrying
Pseudo-Latin multiply in
Graeco-scientific equanimity

All I want is a proper plural platypus
It's that Hellenistic etymology
Disregard hypercorrection
Give a shout-out to inflection
Platypodes are the only things for me!

I need a geekier icon even than Hakkai. I'd have worked in "Ornithorhynchus anatinus," but I couldn't make it scan.

Comments

[teenybuffalo.livejournal.com]

By Gad, madam, I believe you've written a patter song. Flanders and Swann are applauding from their respective graves. I am delighted, myself.

There's a moment in George Macdonald Fraser's The Pyrates where one character says "She's imprisoned naked in a cage over a pool of ravenous giant octopi--" and another man puts in, "Not 'octopi.' Sorry to interrupt, but it's Greek, not Latin. Octopods, octopodES, take your choice, but not octopi." This is like the logical and lovely extension of that conversation.

A platypus patter song that also pops to mind:

http://wonderingminstrels.blogspot.com/2002/04/diplomatic-platypus-patrick-barrington.html

[sovay]

By Gad, madam, I believe you've written a patter song. Flanders and Swann are applauding from their respective graves. I am delighted, myself.

Thank you! I'm not sure there was any other form a song with that first line could have taken.

(My post title was almost "We're often asked how we write these songs. We're often asked why, if it comes to that," but I've had Tom Lehrer on the brain lately, probably because of Ronald Searle.)

A platypus patter song that also pops to mind

"The bitterness of failure was considerably mollified,
However, by the ease with which our platypus had qualified."

Yay.