National Limerick Day? Bollocks!

Last week was apparently National Limerick Day, and the Pittsburgh Post-Gazette solicited limericks from its readers; yesterday they printed some of the overflow. Here is a particularly interesting one, at least from my viewpoint:

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Arlene Gardopee, Butler, on first meeting her husband at the research lab at Brockway Glass Co. in Brockway, where he worked in product development:

In the summer of seventy-four,
He set out in search of amour.
So he said to Arlene,
Want to see my machine?
Thus began an affair of the cœur.

from http://www.post-gazette.com/pg/05136/505032.stm
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Now, isn't that nice. She certainly did try to make a cute anecdote from her life into a limerick, but it just didn't quite work out:

Amour does not rhyme with cœur, no matter how you try to slice it. And the vowel in amour certainly does not rhyme with that in four...that is, unless we're talking about lovin' ovens here.

One cannot, for the most part, rhyme an English word with a French one. The vowels are usually totally different, even though they may be spelled in the same way. And the attempt to rhyme one French word with another one based on its habitual American mispronunciation is unfortunate--she would have done better to insert the Spanish amor, since that would have been closer to the vowel in seventy-four, albeit without the correct R sound. But that still does not excuse the usage of cœur--I can't fix that one for her.

I suppose in the world of butchered French, the limerick works; but it reminds me of my 11th-grade British Lit project involving some "home made" Canterbury Tales: they sounded good to me at the time, but reading them later makes me cringe since my rhyme scheme was just slightly off. And of course, when we are talking about rhyming verse, that slight dissonance truly stands out.

It is one thing to stumble over foreign words and phrases in a private class setting (see previous post), but quite another to do it in print in a public forum.