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.
Finally, which rhymes with enough --
Though, through, plough, or dough, or cough?
Hiccough has the sound of cup.
My advice is to give up!
BLONDES
How to tell if she's a natural blond
A woman walks into the doctors office and says: "Doctor I hurt all over."
And the doctor says, "That's impossible."
"No really!" she said, "Just look, when I touch my arm, ouch! it hurts. When I touch my leg, ouch!, it hurts. When I touch my head, ouch!, it hurts. it really hurts, she replies."
The doctor just shakes his head and says, "You are a natural blond aren't you?"
The woman smiles and says "Why yes I am. How did you know?"
The doctor replies, "Because, your finger is broken."
A Russian, an American, and a Blonde were talking one day. The Russian said, "We were the first in space!" The American said, "We were the first on the moon!"
The Blonde said, "So what, we're going to be the first on the sun.
The Russian and the American looked at each other and shook their heads. "You can't land on the sun, you idiot! You'll burn up!" said the Russian.
To which the Blonde replied, "We're not stupid, you know. We're going at night!"
A blonde was speeding when a local police cruiser pulled her over ...
The police officer also happened to be a blonde and she asked for the blonde's driver's license.
The driver searched frantically in her purse for a while and finally said to the blonde policewoman "What does a driver's license look like?"
Irritated, the blonde cop said "You dummy, it's got your picture on it!"
The blonde driver frantically searched her purse again and found a small rectangular mirror down at the bottom. She held it up to her face and said, "Aha! This must be my driver's license" and handed it to the blonde policewoman.
The blonde cop looked in the mirror, handed it back to the driver and said, "You're free to go. And, if I had known you were a police officer too, we could have avoided all this hassle."