Encouraged by my commenters, I’m taking a break from work to write about work and keep up my sonnet quota, though I suspect that beyond the rhyme scheme and the correct number of lines this hardly qualifies as a sonnet:
Sonnet 2: How many A’s in ‘nav*l’?
Oh spare line editors a thought
who wield blue pencils for a crust
(though, since our kind have mostly bought
PCs or Macs on which we must
track changes, spellcheck, search/replace,
and plumb the depths of cyberspace
to verify a quote’s complete,
blue pencils are now obsolete).
We catch apostrophes that stray,
keep minuscule to just one I.
Two Cs in ‘practised’ make us cry
(unless we’re from the USA).
We care for commas, fix each error,
then make new ones – our greatest terror.
Is there no English rhyme for ‘navel’ either? I knew there was none for ‘orange’. That’s why there are so few sonnets about citrus fruit.
Yours is great anyway – keep up the good work!
Only naval that I can think of, Richard. When I was working the Health Department we didn’t spot a sentence about the Heimlich manoeuvre that described a spot a little below the naval until the day we received a hundred thousand copies of the offending pamphlet – hence my personal attachment to that pair of words. If sight rhymes count, there’s ravel.
Come to think of it, lemon’s not so hot as a rhyme word. Nor is ciitron, or pomelo, or cumquat. You’re obviously right about citrus fruit and sonnets.
Or mandarin, grapefruit, tangerine…no wonder nobody attempts it. But bananas don’t rhyme with pyjamas, so maybe people cut you a bit of slack in the fruity poetry department.
I know I should be taking that as a challenge, Richard, but really, grapefruit? Maybe something about Batman with cape, boot …