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I notice that the examples of stress mismatches are all mine - so do you always make sure that your stresses as well as your vowel sounds match? I imagine somehow that you do . "Handle a bra candelabra" - I see what you mean, but I suppose I feel that the slight mismatch makes for comic effect - the tin can one was a descent too far, I agree! Maybe you should give a mark out of ten each timeEmma Woolgatherer wrote:The stress difference doesn't necessarily matter on its own. MancUnian bAnk union worked fine, because the stress difference wasn't huge, and the vowel sounds matched. It would work in a poem, and especially in a song, where stresses tend to get flattened out by the imposed rhythm of the tune. In this case, though, there's a much greater stress difference, such that each unstressed vowel becomes a schwa (ə), which doesn't match the corresponding vowel sound in the other part of the rhyme. So it wouldn't work in a poem or a song. When both syllables are unstressed it doesn't matter if the vowels are different (as in "Boris cope horoscope"), but there's no way an unstressed "əss" rhymes with a stressed "ess", or an unstressed "ənt" rhymes with a stressed "ent". We had the same problem with "Handle a bra candelabra", where we have an unstressed ə failing twice to rhyme with a stressed ah. And before that there was "Drop a cat a petal, Popocatépetl", but the way most of us mispronounce the last word actually gives us a perfect rhyme.
I confess I've been quite lax about all this hitherto. But I think it's worth considering, as it does make clues much harder to get.
Emma