rhymes.txt

I made this a while ago, but I thought I'd upload it today:

http://www.chiark.greenend.org.uk/~tthurman/rhymes.txt

The purpose is explained by the header:

# Words which appear in this list must be
# - words which have at least three plausible English rhymes
# (e.g. "pint" is not in the list)
# - words which can fit into iambic verse. In other words,
# they must consist of alternating stressed and unstressed
# syllables.
# Each row has three fields, separated by spaces. The first
# is the word. The absolute value of the second is the number
# of syllables in the word. The absolute value of the third
# is a unique code for the rhyme. All words with the
# same value in the rhyme code will rhyme with one another.
#
# 0 and -1 are not used as syllable counts. A monosyllabic word
# has a syllable count of 1.
#
# Iff the syllable count is negative, the word begins on an unstressed
# syllable. Iff the rhyme code is negative, the word ends on an
# unstressed syllable. Note that positive rhyme codes will not usually
# rhyme with negative in English poetry.
#
# Examples:
# calibration 4 -67
# is stressed as "CA li BRA tion"
# and rhymes with other words with rhyme code -67, such as:
# administration -5 -67

This will be useful for poets interested in computational linguistics, and probably not anybody else.

Snakebite

"Snakebite" is a drink made of equal parts beer and cider. ("Cider" here is in its British sense, involving alcohol.) Some people drink it mixed with Ribena, in which case it's "snakebite and black".

Anyway, someone told me that it's illegal to dispense snakebite in half pints. The reason supposedly is that an on-licence permits the sale of beer and cider in approved measures, these being pints and half pints. If a landlord sold you a half pint of snakebite, they would be selling both beer and cider in quarter pints, which is not an approved measure (and indeed would run afoul of short measure law). Hence snakebite can only be sold in full pints.

So the story went, anyway. I don't know whether it's true, but it amused me enough that I tell it here.

(Someone else once told me that nobody will sell you beer on the rocks for fear of short measure, since it's then difficult to tell whether you have a pint— the "pint to line" line doesn't work any more because the beer is displaced by the ice. I don't know whether to believe this either. I am not about to try it out, because if I did I might end up with ice in my beer, and that would be disgusting. Also, everyone would laugh at me.)