Monday, April 16, 2007

Orange thinking

The claim, made by self-appointed self-styled lingua-pundits, is that there is no English-language rhyme for the word "orange."

I have three things to say.

First, before this entry has ended, I will disprove the hypothesis.

Secondly, shame on us all! Where has the creative thinking gone, folks? I'm mean it's like the weather with everybody talking about it and nobody doing anything about it. If you were smart enough to make up a name for your company that rhymed with "orange" you'd make the local news, maybe even national! Advertising would be all done for you, for free, and a whole new bunch of doggerel would be written, much of it ending with lines like, "And a smile of face of the orange..." and your company name up above somewhere.

Thirdly I will create a word that should exist, but doesn't exist. And yes, that word will rhyme with "orange."

Quickly though, the origin of the word "orange." It comes from Sanskrit, as do any number of other words in the English language including "huzza huzza" and "Oh, yeah baby..." The translation of "orange" as used in the original Sanskrit is "apple."

First item of business, disprove the hypothesis that there is no English-language rhyme for "orange." I draw to your attention the following fragment of poetry, found in an ancient Emergency Room. Internal evidence suggests that it was written after the advent of the automobile, but not all scholars agree. In any case, here in all its visually moving imagery and its own unique pathos, is the only remaining fragment of the work:

We're off on a lovely beach-walk,
The sun is setting orange.
But I cannot go with 'er;
Me thumb's stuck in the door 'inge.

Less academically satisfying perhaps, given that what appears may be simply a spelling error and not an actual word, is this anonymous quatrian:

Renovate? I can't wait
To paint the ceilings orange!
Gathering the furnishings
And putting them in storange.

Finally the creation of a new word. This word is inspired by quantuum physics, one of my hobbies. One of the fathers of quantuum physics was Neils Bohr. Another was Walter Heisenburg, he of the Uncertainty Principle. Combining the two:

bohrange: a measure of the extent to which uncertainty is widespread.

Thus, the wisdom of the war in Iraq has a very high bohrange. Impressions of W's intelligence, at least among my friends, enjoys low borange.

2 comments:

Anonymous said...

I am really impressed with the poems your research uncovered. Very authentic, and yet somehow very funny, too.

Lisa said...

Love it!