Thread: Silly question

Is 'rhymes with' a reflexive relation. I made this up as a joke, but it turned into quite the controversy. For instance, if it was a reflexive relation, then we would have 'trivial rhymes,' and we should be calling what people usually refer to as rhymes as 'proper' rhymes. Again, this isn't meant to be anything serious, just something to talk about.

If we consider the rhyme relation as a relation on the set of words, and also make the definition that a rhymes with b iff there is a corospondence of sorts between the syllabols at the end of the 2 words (that haven't been mentioned as being distinct!). Then, we must have octupus rhymes with octupus, as {octupus, octupus} is a set of 2 words.

Originally Posted by Chris11

Is 'rhymes with' a reflexive relation. I made this up as a joke, but it turned into quite the controversy. For instance, if it was a reflexive relation, then we would have 'trivial rhymes,' and we should be calling what people usually refer to as rhymes as 'proper' rhymes. Again, this isn't meant to be anything serious, just something to talk about.

If we consider the rhyme relation as a relation on the set of words, and also make the definition that a rhymes with b iff there is a corospondence of sorts between the syllabols at the end of the 2 words (that haven't been mentioned as being distinct!). Then, we must have octupus rhymes with octupus, as {octupus, octupus} is a set of 2 words.

Isn't it just a matter of convention?

I'm sure homonyms have been used in rhyme schemes with relative success, although I can't think of an example.

RhymeZone rhyming dictionary and thesaurus seems to consider neither {two, two} nor {two, too} as rhyming pairs.

Then again rhymezone's search engine seems defective as "to" returns no one syllable rhymes. Also, the word "two" and the phrase "and to" are considered rhyming. Apparently it's not much of an authority on rhyming.

Homonyms are listed under types of rhymes in the book The Complete Idiot's Guide to Writing Poetry (title clearly indicates it's an authority)

http://books.google.com/books?id=X9k...page&q&f=false

(top of page 94)

Oh I should have scrolled up -- see bottom of page 92, Identical Rhyme.

Wikipedia definition of identical rhyme is different

http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Rhyme#Types_of_rhyme

It also appears to matter in what language you're writing. In English, as has been said, "super-perfect" rhymes are considered weak rhymes. In French, that is not so strictly observed.