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January 1, 2015

Not much rhymes with “Zamyatin”
Posted by Avram Grumer at 02:48 AM * 43 comments

Some say the world will end in Huxley,
Some say in Orwell.
From what I’ve seen of those with bucks, the
Odds do seem to lean towards Huxley.
Yet as I on the matter dwell,
It seems the military state
Is bent on showing that Orwell
Is just as great.
But time will tell.

Comments on Not much rhymes with “Zamyatin”:
#1 ::: Avram ::: (view all by) ::: January 01, 2015, 02:51 AM:

I know, I know: cotton, rotten, forgotten, au gratin.

#2 ::: thomas ::: (view all by) ::: January 01, 2015, 03:12 AM:

This is just to say

We have neutered
the press
that irritated
our bosses

and which
you were probably
counting on
for rescue

We'll give you
Something del.icio.us
Uber sweet
Uber cold.

#3 ::: Serge Broom ::: (view all by) ::: January 01, 2015, 08:36 AM:

Aspirin...
Ibuprofen...

#4 ::: Allan Beatty ::: (view all by) ::: January 01, 2015, 08:53 AM:

Another Russian dystopian writer that I can't think of a rhyme for is Rosenbaum.

#5 ::: Jimbeaux D ::: (view all by) ::: January 01, 2015, 10:26 AM:

I know it's a bummer
but the world will end like Brunner
When he told his tale
and asked what was that smell
the reply was America burning

#6 ::: Theophylact ::: (view all by) ::: January 01, 2015, 12:26 PM:

George Alec Effinger
Gave the human race THE finger;
Only a dunce
Could think the world would end any way other than by "All the Last Wars at Once".

#7 ::: Theophylact ::: (view all by) ::: January 01, 2015, 12:38 PM:

Higgledy Piggledy
Née A. Z. Rosenbaum,
Ayn Rand influenced
Millions of boys:

So-called “Objectivist”
Pseudophilosophy
Promised them visions of
All the best toys.

#8 ::: Tom Whitmore ::: (view all by) ::: January 01, 2015, 01:53 PM:

Eat an orange.
My hands go clammy at in-
venting a more ang-
elic rhyme for Zamyatin.

(orange rhyme stolen from Randall Garrett)

#9 ::: John Mark Ockerblom ::: (view all by) ::: January 01, 2015, 02:00 PM:

Youth today may fear we'll fall inside a world by Suzanne Collins.
But perhaps more feared that would be a world by Margaret Atwood.

#10 ::: Lee ::: (view all by) ::: January 01, 2015, 02:02 PM:

Theophylact, #7: Ooh, thank you -- a new addition to my hexasyllabic-words list!

#11 ::: Bryan ::: (view all by) ::: January 01, 2015, 06:57 PM:

wouldn't it be something like:

I do not like it in the new blog

I do not like it in the gulag

I do not like the Ham that's Green

I do not like it Zamyatin!

(assuming of course my understanding of pronunciation of Zamyatin is not very far off)

Of course if it was pronounced the way it looks I would not like Ham in a tin!

#12 ::: Tom Whitmore ::: (view all by) ::: January 01, 2015, 06:59 PM:

Or perhaps it rhymes with Akhenaten....

#13 ::: bryan ::: (view all by) ::: January 01, 2015, 07:13 PM:

I will not eat it on Newfoundland
And I will not eat it on Greenland
I will not eat it on the island of Staten
I will not eat it on any island Zamyatin

Also, like Walt Whitman, I will not be confined to any particular measure.

#14 ::: rea ::: (view all by) ::: January 01, 2015, 07:19 PM:

Said Lenin and Stalin,
"We don't have a pal in
Yevgeny Zamyatin."

#15 ::: Bryan ::: (view all by) ::: January 01, 2015, 07:19 PM:

he kept on with his florid victuals
he never changed his rhyming ritual
so with cannibalistic glee I ate him
And I will do the same to you Zamyatin.

#16 ::: bryan ::: (view all by) ::: January 01, 2015, 07:20 PM:

he kept on with his florid victuals
he never changed his rhyming ritual
so with cannibalistic glee I ate him
And I will do the same to you Zamyatin.

#17 ::: bryan ::: (view all by) ::: January 01, 2015, 07:21 PM:

came back for seconds.

#18 ::: John Mark Ockerbloom ::: (view all by) ::: January 01, 2015, 07:24 PM:

Drat! A word dropped out when I was typing in #9. What I meant to type was:

Youth today may fear we'll fall inside a world by Suzanne Collins.
But perhaps more feared than that would be a world by Margaret Atwood.

#19 ::: bryan ::: (view all by) ::: January 01, 2015, 07:29 PM:

I apologize for the poems I pilfered
I apologize dear Zamyatin.

(on the off chance it is actually pronounced Mildred and that you come from somewhere were Mildred can be made to rhyme with pilfered)

#20 ::: dotless ı ::: (view all by) ::: January 01, 2015, 09:10 PM:

The "subscribe" link on this page seems to be getting borked by the quote marks in the title. I'm getting:


This page contains the following errors:

error on line 12 at column 42: Entity 'ldquo' not defined
Below is a rendering of the page up to the first error.

Making Light :: :: comments http://nielsenhayden.com/makinglight/archives/016092.html#comments Language, fraud, folly, truth, history, and knitting. Et cetera. en Thu, 01 Jan 2015 02:51:21 -0500 http://www.sixapart.com/movabletype/?v=4.34-en

#21 ::: Fragano Ledgister ::: (view all by) ::: January 01, 2015, 09:35 PM:

There is not much that rhymes with Zamyatin
Except, of course, that soft fabric sateen.

#22 ::: Fragano Ledgister ::: (view all by) ::: January 01, 2015, 09:41 PM:

And as for orange, there is, as is well known, the quatrain by Arthur Guiterman:

In Spakhill buried lies a man of mark
Who brought the obelisk to Central Park,
Redoubtable Commander H. H. Gorringe,
Whose name supplies the long-sought rhyme for 'orange'.

#23 ::: HelenS ::: (view all by) ::: January 01, 2015, 10:25 PM:

"What's the rhyme for porringer?
D'ye ken the rhyme for porringer?
King Jamie had a daughter dear,
And he married her to an Oranger."

#24 ::: Erik Nelson ::: (view all by) ::: January 01, 2015, 10:43 PM:

I say as long as your neighbors don't start turning into rhinoceroses, you don't need to worry.

#25 ::: Steve Taylor ::: (view all by) ::: January 01, 2015, 11:11 PM:

> Not much rhymes with “Zamyatin”

So far, that's the best blog post title of 2015.

#26 ::: Carol Kimball ::: (view all by) ::: January 02, 2015, 11:18 AM:

Let us sit and cast the Tarot
First card will be Mia Farrow
She was linked to Ira Levin
And then married Andre Previn:

One degree of separation.
How many lines of demarcation
Separate Farrow/Alfred Prufrock?
And Elliot harrowed by the true shock

That we should measure out our lives
Not with coffee spoons but as Stepford Wives

#27 ::: Carol Kimball ::: (view all by) ::: January 02, 2015, 11:20 AM:

Harrowed myself that "Levin" may not rhyme with "Previn". Even the Pedia of Wiki was no help.

#28 ::: Tom Whitmore ::: (view all by) ::: January 02, 2015, 12:32 PM:

(And the Eliot you reference only has one L, not 2...) The SF book dealer in the LA area name Levin pronounces it Le-VIN, where the one in Portland pronouces it LEH-vin. Which means you not only have pronunciation problems, but also scansion quandaries.

#29 ::: Miramon ::: (view all by) ::: January 02, 2015, 02:55 PM:

Jimbeaux D @ #5, I'm afraid you've nailed it with Brunner.

#30 ::: Fragano Ledgister ::: (view all by) ::: January 02, 2015, 04:35 PM:

It is, I know, a total bummer
That we are so distant from summer;
I want, right now, to do a runner,
But will read a short tale by Brunner.

#31 ::: Carol Kimball ::: (view all by) ::: January 02, 2015, 05:19 PM:

re: scansion problems -
Yeah, yeah.

I have most commonly heard LEH-vin and PRE-vin, though I suspect at least one if not both are wrong.

But pondering Eliot's (I knew that, too) take on Prufrock's end-of-the-world scenario, and Levin's "turn them all into pretty zombies" being connected by Mia Farrow was too provoking to give up.

You wouldn't believe how many even-worse versions have been rattling around the last couple days.

Putting it up here was an attempt at exorcism.

#32 ::: Tom Whitmore ::: (view all by) ::: January 02, 2015, 06:32 PM:

Completely understandable, Carol Kimball!

#33 ::: Terry Karney ::: (view all by) ::: January 02, 2015, 06:39 PM:

I read it as Zam YA tin, where the stress is on the middle syllable, and the terminal is sounded as in
"tin can".

#34 ::: Theophylact ::: (view all by) ::: January 02, 2015, 06:58 PM:

The sources I read say it's pronounced "zam YAH teen", which isn't anything an American can expect to rhyme with; we would normally use a schwa in the final syllable, and rhyme with "rotten".

#35 ::: Avram ::: (view all by) ::: January 02, 2015, 07:37 PM:

If Zamyatin is pronounced like Rasputin

Da, da, Zamyatin
Crafted a dystopic scene
He showed a world where freedom was gone!
Da, da, Zamyatin
Big panoptic state machine
That watches everything going on!

#36 ::: Lee ::: (view all by) ::: January 02, 2015, 08:59 PM:

Avram, #35: Bravo!

#37 ::: thomas ::: (view all by) ::: January 02, 2015, 11:43 PM:

On the pronounciation: Wikipedia has /zɐˈmʲætʲɪn/, which is essentially what Terry Karney says and what I would have said from the Russian spelling.

#38 ::: Terry Karney ::: (view all by) ::: January 03, 2015, 01:58 AM:

In Russian the only way to get a TEEN ending is to put the stress on the last syllable.

The ending ought to be as in PU tin, not pooTEEN.

So, if the stress is the YA, TEEN isn't an option (and vice versa)

Depending on accent/dialect it's possible for the unstressed "ee" to be a but like teen, but I can't see how to write that form of the vowel in english.

#39 ::: Q. Pheevr ::: (view all by) ::: January 03, 2015, 01:45 PM:

If you can tell Cyrill’c from Latin,
You're well equipped to filk Замятин.

#40 ::: Quill ::: (view all by) ::: January 05, 2015, 03:39 PM:

I asked my friend to pick a color,
And to judge my joke.
She listened, looked, considered
Then tapped a hue and spoke.
"This one's the orangest,
But your joke's a forlorn jest."

#41 ::: Tom Whitmore ::: (view all by) ::: January 05, 2015, 06:50 PM:

I'd have to make that a "for LORAN jest" to actually make it rhyme, myself....

#42 ::: Theophylact ::: (view all by) ::: January 06, 2015, 09:50 AM:

I seem to recall that a character in John Barth's The Sotweed Factor, one Henry Burlingame, successfully rhymes "silver", "April", "seventy" and "orange".

#43 ::: Del Cotter ::: (view all by) ::: January 06, 2015, 11:07 AM:

Absurd, those words don't sound a bit alike!

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