Rhyme Unreason – Frank McNally on Anglo-Scottish relations going from bad to verse

The real-life William McGonagall was famous mainly for being a terrible poet, his clunky metre and rhyming schemes often coming close to comic genius, although it was never deliberate.

I have been doubly amused, therefore, to see that Private Eye’s spoof version of McGonagall, in which he commemorates modern-day equivalents of the “Tay Bridge Disaster”, has been the subject of a recent exchange of pedantic letters, debating whether the magazine is being true to his values.

The controversy started with “Lines on the Football Match Between England and Scotland in the Group Stage of the European Championships”. This included an incorrect suggestion that the two teams had not played each other since 1996.

The own goal inspired an English reader, writing in McGonagallesque verse, to remind Private Eye of a more recent epic, from 2017: “When cheered on by the Hamden Roar/The Sweaties earned a 2-2 draw”.

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Never mind calling Scots “Sweaties” (although that slur was the subject of a separate complaint), a more culturally-attuned correspondent was then moved to point out that “no Scottish poet, not even McGonagall, would ever have dreamt of trying to rhyme the words ‘roar’ and ‘draw’.”

Which is true. The issue there is our old friend, non-rhotic imperialism, of which I too have complained frequently.

Like Winston Churchill when he implied that "jaw-jaw" rhymes with "war-war", the first letter writer was clearly a member of the Flat R society and had unthinkingly imposed his prejudice on poor McGonagall who, bad as he was, would never have committed such an atrocity to print.

But on checking the original poem, I found that Private Eye had itself committed the same offence when having the poet rhyme “nil-all draw” with “metaphor”, another thing McGonagall would simply not have done.

I was reminded that the great Ogden Nash, who had certain similarities with the Scottish poet except that his comedy was always intentional, also used “metaphor” in rhyme once, except he did it right, viz: “One thing that literature would be greatly the better for/Would be a more restricted employment by authors of simile and metaphor.”

Unlike the war-jaw thing, which works only in one accent, that works in both, as did most of most of Nash’s verse. This may have reflected his status as a New Yorker.

It has been said that America became a predominantly r-rolling country only after the Civil War, which moved the centre of power south from non-rhotic New England, while the post-Famine influx of Irish immigrants – rhotic speakers all – was a big influence too.

In any case, New York is on the front line of the two ways of speaking and Nash’s ear was finely tuned to both. He playfully straddled the divide in such classics as “Further Reflections on Parsley”, a poem shorter than its title, comprising as it does the lines: “Parsley/Is gharsely”.

And then there is his verse The Lama, which skirts the issue except in a footnote. The poem itself runs as follows: “The one-l lama/He’s a priest./The two-l llama,/He’s a beast./And I will bet/A silk pyjama/There isn’t any/Three-l lama.”

This must have earned correction from a non-rhotic member of the New York Fire Department, hence Nash’s footnote: “The author’s attention has been called to a type of conflagration known as the three-alarmer.” To which he added: “Pooh”.

Getting back to Private Eye, the R question was the only one to annoy readers of McGonagall’s football poem. Anglo-Scottish relations were also strained by a couplet in which he rhymed “pitch” with “Crianlarich”, a village near the Highlands. A reader of Scots heritage pointed out that, again, the real man would have done no such thing.

Which brings us to another vexed and related subject: the historic inability of Southern English speakers to pronounce the “voiceless velar fricative”. That is typically the soft, sometimes silent “ch” or “gh” in Irish and Gaelic, and results in such phenomena as the names Gallagher and Doherty becoming “Gallagger” and “Dockerty” In England.

It also resulted in a word I touched on earlier this week when discussing the original Tyrone Power. One of the latter's first successes in London was as the stage Irishman Larry "Hoolagan", a mispronounced name that eventually made it into the dictionary.

Its modern meaning seems to have been influenced by the existence in 1890s London of a rowdy Irish family of the surname. But when the term “hooligan” first appeared in The Irish Times, in a story about “another hooligan outrage” in England, the young men responsible were named “Key” and “Praud”.

Hooliganism had become a local problem by then, it seems. And for once, the soft-consonanted Hoolihans of Ireland may have been only too happy that the English had found their own, less recognisable, way to pronounce it.