My suitcase is partway packed. I believe the boys are pretty packed. (David supervised them, yah for a great packer for a husband!) Our turtle-sitter just came to pick up Tiny for his summer "vacation". After lunch vacuumed the dining-kitchen-entrance area and mopped. Next I'll clean both toilets. Just bits and pieces.
The excitement is building, no one, not even our teenager, slept in this morning (I did a little, but that was because I couldn't switch off mentally last night and it got late). We had to take the boys for a ride this morning, because they were getting too loud with pent-up energy.
Last night around the dinner table the energy was getting too much, so I pulled out a book to fill in some time while everyone finished their meal. I happened upon a book I pulled out of a free-box from the school library. Rhyming Dictionary. Now you wouldn't expect that to be a very interesting read, would you? But the guys took turns in asking me to look up words and we had some unexpected results. The most memorable is the list that reads:
beanie
genie
meany
teeny
wienie (which is a homonym to weeny, as in tiny)
bikini
Houdini (who couldn't get out of the teeny, wienie bikini!)
Oh boy, we had trouble regaining control after that lot.
But we were in for some surprises. Some lists reminded us that this was an American dictionary (though with all the different accents in America, I'm sure that all Americans wouldn't agree on all the lists either). For example, these words purportedly rhyme:
Aussie
bossy
glossy
mossy
posse
saucy
For all those out there who don't understand the problem. Aussie is pronounced correctly as Ozzie. Rhyming with mozzie (except you probably don't know our abbreviation for mosquito).
And these:
con
dawn
don
drawn
fawn
gone
John
on
pawn
baton
coupon
python
pecan
Yvonne
Genghis Khan
According to this dictionary, "reservoir" rhymes with salad bar as well as dinosaur. So I guess that is a sign that there are different pronounciations within the states. We have ourselves a son who's studied French for two years and tells us that the way (most) Australians say it is the French way, as in, rhymes with star.
Oh well, away from linguistics and back to packing and cleaning. I'm hoping to be done by 8.30 so that David and I can watch the next episode of Grey's Anatomy (we have the second series on DVD). We watched the first of a two part-er last night, finishing with the main character having her hand on a live bomb which was inside the body cavity of a patient! No, don't tell me what happens!
As for now, a coffee, then back to the cleaning.
2 comments:
Hi Wendy,
I'm feeling excited for you too - hope you have a great time.
As far as reservoir goes, my experience (born and grew up in NSW, now live in Victoria), is that most people in NSW rhyme it with star (like Qld?), whereas is Victoria it is more often than not said to rhyme with dinosaur, and without the "w" sound, so more like reservore.
Reservoir in Sydney ends in vwa.
Americans can't handle a simple o sound. So they put their children in a cart to sleep. And they call Colin Powell Colon Powell. Try getting an American to say yobbo. It is really funny.
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