Lyrics for Singable Patter-Satire: Tom Lehrer Sings "ALLITERATIVE BINOMIALS, #2"

PARODY SONG-LYRICS

ORIGINAL SONG: "The Elements", Tom Lehrer, 1959.

Occasional binomials show alliteration
(e.g. one and only)

PARODY COMPOSED: Dr. G.H. and Giorgio Coniglio,  2015. This song is the third of nine in the series on Word Pairs. You can find the links to the lyrics of the previous songs at the bottom of the post. 

EXPLANATION: The current effort involves a linguistic device discussed by Wikipedia as “Siamese twins” or ‘Irreversible Binomials”. These 

phrases include some of the most colorful expressions in English. There are probably a thousand binomial expressions in the English language. To enhance the singability, I have skewed my selection of binomial pairs here, to emphasize those that have alliteration of the 2 elements. 

For discussion of binomials, see the recent post here; there is a also an earlier post that honors our previous exploration of these intriguing expressions, and is entitled "The Allure of Word-Pairs: Alliterative Binomials (compendium)".

UKULELE and GUITAR-FRIENDLY LINK: Our whole series of songs can be found in a friendly format for ukulele (and guitar)-players on our sister blog  "SILLY SONGS and SATIRE". Click here to proceed to this site. But note that as it is a 'private blog' you will need to arrange access, if you don't already have it. Leave a comment on this post if you want to access the version with chord-charts and helpful performing suggestions. 

Dungeons and dragons, dark and dank, and dear departed, do or die, 

And cliques and clans,  and kith and kin, and bag and baggage, flee and

 fly,

Head over heels, and belle and beau, Beauty and Beast, and two for tea,

And mind and matter, mine and mill, and flew through flue, the fly and flea. 

There’s vim and vigor, pain or pleasure, fast and furious, slow but sure

And watching waiting, safe or sorry, walking wounded, kill or cure

And grins and giggles, hems and haws, and his and hers, guys gals or dolls

And quake and quiver, black and blue, right wrong, St. Peters and St. Paul's. 

There’s stress and strain, and short and stout, and scratch and save, and shirts and shorts

Shoes socks, and art and artifice, and toil and trouble, tarts and tortes

And read and write, bold beautiful, and beg or borrow, this-and-thats

Moon o'er Miami, baked and battered, where or when, and heads and hats.

There's prince and pauper, prim and proper, pots and pans, and put-upon 
And drunken and disorderly, warp woof, wrack ruin, and AlAnon.
The order of paired elements - important? yes, no, may-aybe;

Be careful not to throw out the bathwater with the ba-aby.

Yet, slip and slide, not hair nor hide, the definition gets defied, 
Like 'Prejudice' before the 'Pride', so 'side by side' is classified
With home sweet home, rose is a rose, eye for an eye, and nose to nose - 
These phrases pose the gap to close that spaces poetry from prose.


There's Jack and Jill, from dusk 'til dawn, bumper to bumper, inch by inch,
And first and foremost, hand in hand, with spice and sugar, just a pinch.
"What's right is right, what's fair is fair", said more and more by Mo-other,
From sea to shining sea, if it's not one thing, it's ano-other. 

HOT LINKS to WORD-PAIR PARODY LYRICS,

here on the wordplay-poetry-lyrics blog "Edifying Nonsense" ...

Pairs

Binomials (didactic discussion)

Alliterative Binomials, part #1 

Alliterative Binomials, part #2

Rhyming Binomials, A to L

Rhyming Binomials, M to Z

Reduplications - Lesson

Reduplications - Lexicon A to K

Reduplications - Lexicon L to Z

Legal Doublets .

If you want to resume daily titillations on our blog 'Daily Illustrated Nonsense', click HERE. Once you arrive, you can select your time-frame of interest from the calendar-based listings in the righthand margin, and check the daily offerings for any week in the years 2020 and 2021. (There are now almost 700 daily entries on the Daily blog, and most of these are also presented here on 'Edifying Nonsense' in topic-based collections.)

BUZZWORDS: 5-or 6-legged verses about INSECTS

WORDPLAY post with Illustrated Verses

SATIRE COMPOSED: Dr.G.H. and Giorgio Coniglio (registered pseudonym), July 2019, updated April 2023. Most of the verses presented here have been published  at OEDILF.com, an online humor dictionary that has accumulated over 120,000 carefully edited limericks. Giorgio can currently point to 600 of his submissions accepted for publication (many of them have been reproduced on this blog for your enjoyment). 

To view more instances of "HOLESOME VERSE: Limericks About CLOTHING MOTHS", click HERE.

Authors' Note: The isabella tiger moth, Pyrrharctia isabella enters the cold season in wintry parts of North America in the form of a banded woolly bear caterpillar. Traditionally, her peer-group would attempt to get through the winter by altering their metabolism to manufacture compounds known as cryoprotectives, allowing them to recover from freezing. Our protagonist seems to have discovered another way around this challenge.

Authors' Note: Fact-sheets dealing with related key information have been posted here by etymologists. These include short poems pertaining to insects that eat woollens, scavenge for food, destroy wood structures, prey on human blood and torment domestic pets.

Readers are advised to exercise care in distinguishing entomologists from etymologists.

Authors' Note: The authors note, with regret, and with continuing scratching of their inflamed ankles, the opening of the 'fire ant season'.      

Even in the winter, they can be activated.
Watch out!

Learn more about the red imported fire ant (RIFA) at Wikipedia.

Authors' Note:   The term 'gnat' can be used to described a variety of small, swarming flies. Owing to their small size, the sort that bite are often known as 'no see 'ums'. There is a companion piece to this verse 'gnat repellent' that extends the details of this topic.    

Authors' Note:  For several decades, there has been a prevalent belief that a particular bath oil product had the ancillary property of repelling attacks by swarms of gnats. However, objective testing by the American organization Consumers Union has debunked a special role for this product. 

Learn more about gnat repellents at Consumers Union's website.

Requests from many entomologists, armchair nature enthusiasts, pest control professionals, buggers, and just ordinary folks have come to fruition; there is now a pair of follow-up post continuing this theme (BUGS!), that you can easily access by clicking HERE! 

DIRECTION FOR WEB-TRAVELLERS: 

To resume daily titillations on our blog 'Daily Illustrated Nonsense', click HERE. Once you arrive, you can select your time frame of interest from the calendar-based listings in the righthand margin, and check the daily offerings for any month in the years 2020 to the present. (As of September 2022, there are 1000 entries available on the Daily blog, and most of these are also presented here on 'Edifying Nonsense' in topic-based collections.)

Sentimental Verse: DENTAL FEELINGS

CURRENT CONTENTS:

Cavities

D.D.S.

Deep Dental Cleaning (perio-)

Flossing

Gnashing (bruxism)

Hallowe'en verse (sugary treats)

Implants

Mercury-amalgam fillings 

Prognathism

Root canals

Fluoridation (3 verses: 'a brief saga')

Authors' Note: 

local: jargon for injectable local an(a)esthetic

Authors' Note: 

glossary: a lexicon of the foreign-derived, technical or obscure words of a field of work 

Authors' Note: 

to get one's just deserts: idiom, for getting what one deserves (surprisingly, this expression is unrelated to the ingestion of sugary treats).

The chief reason for needing tooth replacement in late adulthood is dental caries and its consequences. 

Authors' Note:  The use of amalgam as the basis of dental fillings is reviewed here. PLus, your favorite limericists have made some more general comments about mercury poisoning ('erethism') HERE. Although standard dental amalgam is an alloy of mercury and silver, routine removal of these fillings is not routinely recommended. Ask your dentist.

Authors' Note: 

gnathic: referring to the jaw or to the mandibular bone

idiopathic: of unknown cause

You can also review the three-verse poem "Fluoridation" in a more readable format on our daily blog "Daily Illustrated Nonsense" by clicking HERE.

AND, HERE'S A LIST OF LINKS to collections of other intriguing verses on medical/dental topics that can now be found on posts including:

Patients and their Maladies (parts #1, #2 and #3)

The Bottom Line of Medical Humour

Funny Bones (parts #1 and #2)
Doctors and their Practices (parts #1 and #2)

To Clot or Not to Clot

The Scopes of Modern Medicine

Handbook of Medical Testing Statistics

Organic Brain Poetry

Pandemic Verses

Poetry of Healthcare

Diagnostic Imaging (selected topics)

Toxic Vignettes

Sleek Greek Prefixes

and in 'brief sagas' including:

Drug Development

Radiation Exposure

Methylated Spirits

The Gastro-Esophageal Junction

Workplace Pollution

Food Intolerance

DIRECTION FOR WEB-TRAVELLERS:

If you want to resume daily titillations on our blog 'Daily Illustrated Nonsense', click HERE. Once you arrive, you can select your time frame of interest from the calendar-based listings in the righthand margin, and check the daily offerings for any month in the years 2020 through 2022. (As of September 2022, there are over 1000 daily entries on the Daily blog, and most of these are also presented here on 'Edifying Nonsense' in topic-based collections.)

Immersible Bird-Verse: WATERFOWL #4 (P to T)

WORDPLAY POST 

PARODY COMPOSED: Dr. G.H. and Giorgio Coniglio (registered pseudonym), 2019/2020, a continuation of prior blogposts about waterfowl. 

  Readers who enjoy poetry describing the natural world around them with illustrative images and informative text, might also enjoy these previous  blog-offerings, each a collection of eight poems on the wider topic...

Verses about Waterfowl, June '19
Verses about Waterfowl (part #2), July '19

Verses about Waterfowl (part #3), Apr '20

CURRENT CONTENTS:

The pelicatessen

Pescatarians

Roseate spoonbills

Ruddy turnstones

Snow Geese

Snowy Egrets

Swan spp

Tricolored Herons

Authors' Note:

fress is a loanword verb from either German or Yiddish implying eating heartily or snacking frequently.

delicatessen has been applied to both high-end retail food stores selling unusual and imported prepared foods, and to restaurants preparing German, Jewish or other ethnic cuisine (frequently, the two functions are combined). It may also refer to the products purchased in these outlets.

Sushi is not among the expected foods in such an establishment, so the analogy to a pelicatessen for waterfowl has been unexplored until now. At least in Canadian official documents, for the sake of gender-neutrality, fishermen are referred to as fishers.

After initially using this neologism (word-creation) as a descriptor on the blog "Edifying Nonsense", and misconstruing it as his personal invention, the author became aware, via the internet, that there is a restaurant located at a resort on Bald Head Island, North Carolina with that name. Although that fact is of interest, it is of limited relevance. Seabirds are apparently not served at the establishment, either as customers, or as menu-fare.

DIRECTION FOR WEB-TRAVELLERS: 

To resume daily titillations on our blog 'Daily Illustrated Nonsense', click HERE. Once you arrive, you can select your time frame of interest from the calendar-based listings in the righthand margin, and check the daily offerings for any month in the years 2020 to the present. (As of September 2022, there are 1000 entries available on the Daily blog, and most of these are also presented here on 'Edifying Nonsense' in topic-based collections.) For birdlovers, one of the advantages of the Daily blog is that it includes our ad hoc postings of brief videos of waterfowl flying and swimming, even parading about on land. 

Bird-watchers, academic ornithologists, wordplay enthusiasts, wildlife photographers, Giorgio's relatives, and just everyday folks have united in their demand for still more illustrated doggerel on this topic!

So, please follow this link! 

If you want to resume daily titillations on our blog 'Daily Illustrated Nonsense', click HERE. Once you arrive, you can select your time frame of interest from the calendar-based listings in the righthand margin, and check the daily offerings for any week in the years 2020 and 2021. (There are now over 700 daily entries on the Daily blog, and most of these are also presented here on 'Edifying Nonsense' in topic-based collections.)