In the tradition of They Might Be Giants' "James K. Polk," the band Two Man Gentlemen Band, who describe themselves in an email to me as a "vaudevillian-swing duo," have released the song "Franklin Pierce," in honor of the fourteenth U.S. president. They rhyme the president's last name with the word tears and beer, perhaps on account of his struggle with alcoholism. (It may not have been pronounced that way, though. His contemporary Lydia Maria Child, who loathed Pierce for opposing abolitionism, once said his name rhymed with curse.)
Category: orthoepy
Cockney Keats?
“Keats Speaks,” my essay about whether the real Keats spoke the way the one in the recent Jane Campion movie does, appears in the 1 November 2009 issue of the New York Times Magazine.
You can read the Blackwood’s Edinburgh Magazine article that accused Keats of “Cockney rhymes” here (though signed “Z.,” it was by John Gibson Lockhart, and it appeared in the August 1818 issue). Just as infamous was a similar attack in the Quarterly Review by John Wilson Croker (though the issue was dated April 1818, it actually appeared in September).