fragileheart's journal

Katia Millar posted a link to this article on facebook and I just had to try it out but it wouldn’t be any fun if there were no witnesses.

Listen to Reggy reading “English Pronunciation” by G. Nolst Trenité

Just in case you’d rather read the words off my blog, here you are:

Dearest creature in creation,
Study English pronunciation.
I will teach you in my verse
Sounds like corpse, corps, horse, and worse.
I will keep you, Suzy, busy,
Make your head with heat grow dizzy.
Tear in eye, your dress will tear.
So shall I! Oh hear my prayer.
Just compare heart, beard, and heard,
Dies and diet, lord and word,
Sword and sward, retain and Britain.
(Mind the latter, how it’s written.)
Now I surely will not plague you
With such words as plaque and ague.
But be careful how you speak:
Say break and steak, but bleak and streak;
Cloven, oven, how and low,
Script, receipt, show, poem, and toe.
Hear me say, devoid of trickery,
Daughter, laughter, and Terpsichore,
Typhoid, measles, topsails, aisles,
Exiles, similes, and reviles;
Scholar, vicar, and cigar,
Solar, mica, war and far;
One, anemone, Balmoral,
Kitchen, lichen, laundry, laurel;
Gertrude, German, wind and mind,
Scene, Melpomene, mankind.
Billet does not rhyme with ballet,
Bouquet, wallet, mallet, chalet.
Blood and flood are not like food,
Nor is mould like should and would.
Viscous, viscount, load and broad,
Toward, to forward, to reward.
And your pronunciation’s OK
When you correctly say croquet,
Rounded, wounded, grieve and sieve,
Friend and fiend, alive and live.
Ivy, privy, famous; clamour
And enamour rhyme with hammer.
River, rival, tomb, bomb, comb,
Doll and roll and some and home.
Stranger does not rhyme with anger,
Neither does devour with clangour.
Souls but foul, haunt but aunt,
Font, front, wont, want, grand, and grant,
Shoes, goes, does. Now first say finger,
And then singer, ginger, linger,
Real, zeal, mauve, gauze, gouge and gauge,
Marriage, foliage, mirage, and age.
Query does not rhyme with very,
Nor does fury sound like bury.
Dost, lost, post and doth, cloth, loth.
Job, nob, bosom, transom, oath.
Though the differences seem little,
We say actual but victual.
Refer does not rhyme with deafer.
Foeffer does, and zephyr, heifer.
Mint, pint, senate and sedate;
Dull, bull, and George ate late.
Scenic, Arabic, Pacific,
Science, conscience, scientific.
Liberty, library, heave and heaven,
Rachel, ache, moustache, eleven.
We say hallowed, but allowed,
People, leopard, towed, but vowed.
Mark the differences, moreover,
Between mover, cover, clover;
Leeches, breeches, wise, precise,
Chalice, but police and lice;
Camel, constable, unstable,
Principle, disciple, label.
Petal, panel, and canal,
Wait, surprise, plait, promise, pal.
Worm and storm, chaise, chaos, chair,
Senator, spectator, mayor.
Tour, but our and succour, four.
Gas, alas, and Arkansas.
Sea, idea, Korea, area,
Psalm, Maria, but malaria.
Youth, south, southern, cleanse and clean.
Doctrine, turpentine, marine.
Compare alien with Italian,
Dandelion and battalion.
Sally with ally, yea, ye,
Eye, I, ay, aye, whey, and key.
Say aver, but ever, fever,
Neither, leisure, skein, deceiver.
Heron, granary, canary.
Crevice and device and aerie.
Face, but preface, not efface.
Phlegm, phlegmatic, ass, glass, bass.
Large, but target, gin, give, verging,
Ought, out, joust and scour, scourging.
Ear, but earn and wear and tear
Do not rhyme with here but ere.
Seven is right, but so is even,
Hyphen, roughen, nephew Stephen,
Monkey, donkey, Turk and jerk,
Ask, grasp, wasp, and cork and work.
Pronunciation (think of Psyche!)
Is a paling stout and spikey?
Won’t it make you lose your wits,
Writing groats and saying grits?
It’s a dark abyss or tunnel:
Strewn with stones, stowed, solace, gunwale,
Islington and Isle of Wight,
Housewife, verdict and indict.
Finally, which rhymes with enough,
Though, through, plough, or dough, or cough?
Hiccough has the sound of cup.
My advice is to give up!!!

– written by G. Nolst Trenité

I made a lot of mistakes along the way but this was a lot of fun to record. I’m sure I could’ve cheated and tried again but I already got to cheat twice because people called in the middle of my first two tries.

Also, just in case you’re wondering: I was listening to Graydon James & The Young Novelists and that’s who you can hear in the background. The fan sound is from the kitchen exhaust.

If you happened to do the same and you’ve recorded yourself reading this out loud, please leave a link in the comments so I can follow along!

Will I ever love again? It’s a question that has been on my mind for a while now. It’s the question that led me to go on my mancation¹.

The honest answer right now is: I simply don’t know.

I find myself avoiding thinking about things that have happened². It’s unlike me. The moniker fragileheart wasn’t coined because I wanted people to walk on eggshells with me. It’s supposed to remind me that I wear my heart on my sleeve and that I like to feel things because it makes me feel alive. Finding myself running away from memories that make me smile is a little unnerving.

I don’t think I know how to be in a relationship. It’s been so long since I’ve been in a real relationship that I don’t know that I’ll ever manage to maintain one again. My last real, meaningful, mutually respectful relationship ended in 2004. Everything else after that I consider a mess. Yes, even my relationship with the Irish boy³.

Then again, I’ve gotten better at maintaining deeper and more meaningful friendships and I think that every good relationship is built on a solid foundation of friendship so maybe there’s hope for me yet.

Oh whatever. Maybe you⁴ were right; what was it that you said, sir? Something along the lines of, “You’d make a great mistress [but not a wife]“. And yes, I still think about it to this day.

Sometimes, you just need to blog things out loud.

Footnotes:

1. vacation from men, and more importantly – meaningless sex[↩]
2. like NYE[↩]
3. that was probably the biggest mess[↩]
4. I do not even know if you read my blog[↩]

As yet another year is coming to a close¹ and the countdowns are starting to rise² I was trying to figure out what I wanted to write about. As I have been doing for the last six months of life. I’ve been through so much in the last little while that I don’t even know where to begin. Everytime I go for a run I think of about a dozen blog posts that I would love to write about once I sit in front of my computer and start typing; I lose my conviction about three-quarters of the way through.

I know exactly why and yet I can not for the life of me figure out how to fix it; other than in fact: fixing the problems that I want to write about. In some way this change is for the better: I no longer simply complain about my problems, I actually do something about it. Not so good for the life of this journal, but great for me on a larger scale³.

Ryan Nus, friend and fellow blogger⁴ indirectly wrote about my problem really well in his latest blog post titled, Resolve to be Fearless. There are a lot of reasons I’ve been afraid to say what I want to say and I may never finish and publish those blog posts but I’m okay with it. Partially because a lot of what would have been relevant in the writing is in the past and who likes digging that up for no good reason?

I’m not making any further resolutions this year. I’ve taken a mancation⁵ and it has helped me really evaluate what it is I want out of a partner. I’ve had time to figure out what I want out of my career. There are no quick ways of getting either but I don’t care. I have faith that things will work out the way I want it to. Not only because I have back-up plans/dreams but because I don’t feel like I have anything to lose – and when you feel like you’ve got nothing to lose, you’re not going to stop until you get what you want. Right, Ryan?

What are you thinking about as 2011 comes to a close? What are you looking forward to the most in 2012?

Footnotes:

1. it’s getting old at this point, to be honest[↩]
2. bad pun completely intended[↩]
3. or is it?[↩]
4. much more prolific than I have been of late[↩]
5. a vacation from men[↩]

Disclaimer: I’m neither of these things, I’m poor and broke

There is something about wishing someone well that lifts up my soul. This Christmas when I find myself with not much else to offer I started sending some verbal and written love to people and I found myself smiling all the same as if I had been able to give everyone presents like I would have wanted to.

I hope you have all had a wonderful Holiday season and continue to have a happy whatever-holiday-you’re-celebrating. I am with family and am having a happy Christmas¹.

Merry Christmas!
Happy Hannukkah!
Happy Holidays!

Just be happy, hokay? LOVE!

Footnotes:

1. and proof that you can be happy without a job nor a boyfriend[↩]

This year could have gone much worse than it did but I’m not going to lie and say that I never once thought to myself, “This sucks”. I’m human, of course I thought that. But maybe I was taking things for granted even when I thought I wasn’t.

Two years ago, after my five year relationship with a man I thought was ‘my one’ ended, I signed up for a consumer proposal. A consumer proposal is when you sk your creditors (through a Trustee) to waive a percentage of your debt. My debt wasn’t large¹ but I was fed up of the cycle of paying my minimum balance only to need to use the credit I had just earned for things that I thought I needed. When you’re in a consumer proposal your credit rating is reduced to the same as it would be if you had declared bankruptcy². After the 5 years are up, your credit rating rises two points³ during which you can apply for credit cards and slowly build your credit rating back up.

And so for the last two years I’ve been living without a credit card and it has been a fantastic⁴ and educational⁵ ride. But even though I’ve experienced small bouts of unemployment in the last year and a half, I’m so grateful that I signed up for the program. My bills are far lower than they would have been had I kept the credit cards⁶.

Even though my family and I haven’t been able to get wrapped up⁷ in the craziness of the season: buying gifts, hiding it from each other, wrapping it on the DL (you get the gist), I find myself looking forward to spending Christmas & Eve with them – probably playing board games and listening to Christmas music⁸.

Sure it would have been nice to drive down to Chicago to meet up with our family friends who will be down there, but spending time at home will be just as nice. I just think it’d be even nicer if it were all white outside when we do. So I’m dreaming of a white Christmas⁹…

Are you?

Footnotes:

1. it was under $20k[↩]
2. An R9[↩]
3. to an R7[↩]
4. not[↩]
5. def[↩]
6. only because I probably wouldn’t have been able to keep my balance low enough so as not to have such high monthly minimum payments[↩]
7. no pun intended[↩]
8. or maybe, hopefully ice skating in Nathan Philips Square[↩]
9. and no, I don’t even care about the presents. I just want your presence[↩]