Gordon Lightfoot Forums - Lightfoot's Alliterations

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What are some alliterations that you remember from Gordon's songs? Two I always remember are "Wicked wind" from Shadows and "Hat and Hexagram" from Gotta Get Away.

One of my fave songs -
Lesson in Love is full of them:
A Lesson In Love (Songbook) 4:05

Nothing is for certain
That's what the showman said
First you must open the curtain
And stand'em on their heads
There can be no inhibitions
No prima donna ways
If you want to pass the audition
And times is tough these days
Remember when Mr. Barnum
Presented Jenny Lind
They named a candy after her
A circus after him
End of my story
The rest is history
She in all of her glory
He lived quietly
He needed her, she needed him
As sure as the sky above
In a way it was for them
A lesson in love
A lesson in love

You look like the moonglow
That follows me home
Always makes me turn around
Won't leave me alone
First to come are the midgets
A monkey and a kid
Followed by those two one-armed jugglers
The ego and the id

Songs of the season
Apples of the sun
There is no rhyme or reason
Just a time for each and every one
Hang on Mr. Barnum
Hang on Jenny Lind
We will meet you in streets of gold
Where eternity begins
We will let it all hangout
Go hand in glove
Live was meant to live and learn
A lesson in love
A lesson in love

Maybe I don't know what an alliteration is. I thought it was like "Sally sang softly saturday". Using more than just 2 words in a string. I don't see an alliterations in that song...

Alliteration is the repetition of initial consonant sounds in neighboring words. Example:
In cliches: sweet smell of success, a dime a dozen, bigger and better, jump for joy....
While alliteration is the recurrence of single letter-sounds, there is another kind of recurrence which is the echo or repetition of a word or phrase. This is found in many kinds of poetry, from nonsense rhymes to ballads. The repeated words or syllables add an extra beat and accentuate the rhythm.

For the literary minded among us, here's a prime example from my English lit days. I actually wrote a ten page paper analyzing this - and got an A+, so it's dear to my heart, LOL:

Pied Beauty
- Gerard Manley Hopkins
-------------------------------------------------

Glory be to God for dappled things --

For skies of couple-colour as a brinded cow;

For rose-moles all in stipple upon trout that swim;

Fresh-firecoal chestnut-falls; finches' wings;

Landscape plotted & pieced -- fold, fallow, & plough;

And all trades, their gear & tackle & trim.

All things counter, original, spare, strange;

Whatever is fickle, freckled, (who knows how?)

With swift, slow; sweet, sour; adazzle, dim;

He fathers-forth whose beauty is past change:

Praise him.

************************************************
Considerably less noticeable is Gord's "
Pickin' up the pieces of my sweet shattered dream" opening from Carefree Highway. Or all the Ws in "What can you do, you’ll never win,
Where will you go, when night closes in?
Where will it lead, will it ever it end,
Where will it stop?" from Clouds of Loneliness. It pops up again in High and Dry: "Her sails billow like bubbles..." Or the Ts in "What a tale my thoughts could tell" from IYCRMM. Or "From the bar room to the bedpost" from Long Way Back Home. Etc., etc. etc. Not as florid as Hopkins and Gord uses alliteration less than internal rhyme and rhythm, the songwriter's basic tools.

Thanks Annie! I just learned more before 9am than most people do all day!

Alexander Bain, in his ‘English Composition and Rhetoric’, (enlarged edition, Part II, 1888) states that the term alliteration is employed to signify the commencing of successive words with the same letter or syllable…. (I know – Yawn, yawn – blah, blah blah……)

To the tune of thunder there’s a tear in every eye. …

To the tune of thunder there’s no time t’ wonder why. …(from Drink Yer Glasses Empty – one of the most beautiful songs ever written)

….Unless (he continues) … it offends the ear: as in, “Birds in all Creation will be twittering in the trees”.
Now, I’m sorry, but ‘twittering in the trees’ has always offended my ears. So, it seems that alliteration is in the ear of the beholder.

That's funny, I always liked "twitterin' in the trees" because that is exactly what they do! LOL

Editing to add: I like the alliteration in "All the Lovely Ladies" very much.

Mouse

Nah! They don’t twitter!!! LOL
I have two robins in my garden who mob me if I don’t put out any mealworms for them.
The sparrows and finches leap about and squawk in the trees if they don’t have any seeds in their feeders

There are also two hedgehogs who heroically hover, hoping for food.

We have bluebirds, orioles, wild canaries, chickadees, and warblers (among other birds) up here in the north country for the summer months, and they *do* twitter, LOL.

So Gaby and Sharron - do you think that the birds "speak" differently since they are in different countries?
Funny how birds decide they need to be kept if you've fed them even once. I have birds at my house year after year just because I feed them in the winter.

twittering int he trees is not only alliteration it is onamatoepia:
http://www.reference.com/browse/wiki/Onomatopoeia

Dictionary - Thesaurus - Encyclopedia - Web

Onomatopoeia
In rhetoric, linguistics and poetry, onomatopoeia is a figure of speech that employs a word, or occasionally, a grouping of words, that imitates, echoes, or suggests the object it is describing, such as "bang", "click", "fizz", "hush" or "buzz" and not "moo" "quack" or "meow", since animals do not create those sounds.
Onomatopoetic words exist in every language, although they are different in each. For example, in Latin, tuxtax is the equivalent of "bam" or "whack" and was meant to imitate the sound of blows landing. In Ancient Greek, koax was used as the sound of a frog. In Japanese, dokidoki is used to indicate the beating of a heart. Sometimes onomatopoetic words have a very tenuous relationship with the sound they describe, such as bow-wow in English and mung-mung in Chinese for the sound a dog makes. Some animals are actually named after the sounds they make, especially birds such as the cuckoo and chickadee.

Examples and uses of onomatopoeia
Everyday Examples
Some very common English-language examples include:
hiss
beep
boing
boom
brum, brum for the sound of a car engine.
burble
clap
hiccup
mumble
Ping pong
plop
thud
tick-tock
swoosh
For animal sounds, the following words are typically used in English:

Bee - "buzz"
Cat - "mereow" (U.S.) / "miamiow" (UK), "meow" (U.S.) / "miow" (UK), "purr"
Chickadee - "chickadee"
Chicken - "cluck," "cackle," "bawk,"
Rooster - "Cockadoodledoo"
bird - "chirp", "tweet"
Cow - "moo"
dove - "coo"
Crow or raven - "caw"
Dog - "woof" or "grrr"
dolphin - "click"
Duck - "quack"
Chinchilla - "brupbrupbrup"
flies - "buzz"
Frog - "ribbit"
Lion - "roar"
Horse - "neigh", "whinny", "snort"
Humans - "Prattle", "blab", "blah blah", "murmur", "brouhaha", others
Mouse - "squeak"
Owl - "hoo" or "hoot"
Road Runner - "beep beep" (due to the popularity of the television cartoon)
snake - "hiss"
Pig - "oink"
Sheep - "baa"
Wolf - "ow ow owooooo"
See also http://www.georgetown.edu/faculty/ba...s/animals.html for information on animal sounds throughout the world.

Examples in literature
Examples in literature often strive to be more suggestive than imitative:

"Over the cobbles he clattered and clashed in the dark innyard". Alfred Noyes The Highwayman
"My days have crackled and gone up in smoke..." Francis Thompson The Hound of Heaven
"And the ere three shrill notes the pipe uttered, / You heard as if a army muttered; / The muttering grew to a grumbling; / And the grumbling grew to mighty rumbling; / And out of the house the rats came tumbling." Robert Browning The Pied Piper Of Hamelin
"The moan of doves in immemorial elms, / And murmuring of innumerable bees. Alfred Lord Tennyson
Onomatopoeia in music
Onomatopoeia-based music uses the mouth and vocal cords (that is, voice) as the primary musical instrument. A common musical tool in European and American cultures is a method of voice music, technically called as solfege. A solfege is a vocalized musical scale that is commonly known as Do-Re-Mi-Fa-Sol-La-Ti. A solfege may be sung, spoken or used in a combination. A variety of similar tools are used in voice improvisation found in scat singing of jazz, Delta blues and also rock and roll and the ska variation of reggae music (especially in the form of ska called Two Tone). Asian music, especially carnatic music employs onomatopoeia to a large extent.
It should be noted that historically, some forms of onomatopoeia served as a mnemonic and a mimetic tool for musicians around the world, for example kuchi shōga, a Japanese system for pronouncing drum sounds. See Voice instrumental music.

According to Dick Higgins, "Three basic types of sound poetry from the relative past come to mind immediately: folk varieties, onomatopoetic or mimetic types, and nonsense poetries. The folk roots of sound poetry may be seen in the lyrics of certain folk songs, such as the Horse Songs of the Navajos or in the Mongolian materials collected by the Sven Hedin expedition." (Primary reference: Henning Haslund-Christiansen, "The Music of the Mongols: Eastern Mongolia" 1943:New York, Da Capo Press:1971; secondary reference: "A Taxonomy of Sound Poetry" by Dick Higgins, From "Precisely: Ten Eleven Twelve", 1981).

Non-auditory onomatopoeia
While almost all onomatopoeia in common English usage imitate sounds, cross-linguistically it is sometimes the case that an item of onomatopoeia describes another kind of phenomenon. The Japanese language is especially notorious for utilizing onomatopoeia to describe soundless concepts; for instance, Japanese "bara bara" is an onomatopoeic form meaning "scattered," and is considered to be imitative without being auditory. Perhaps amusingly, "shiiin" in Japanese stands for the "sound" of silence. (See Japanese sound symbolism.) English is almost entirely devoid of non-auditory onomatopoeia, though the Simpsons-inspired item "yoink," the sound of someone stealing something, is gaining parlance.
Onomatopoeia in advertising
Advertising uses onomatopeoia as a mnemonic so consumers will remember their products:
Rice Krispies - "Snap, crackle, pop" when you pour on milk
Alka-Seltzer - makes a "plop, plop, fizz, fizz" noise when dunked in water
Cocoa Puffs - a wacky bird is "cuckoo" for them
Onomatopoeic names
Occasionally, words for things are created from representations of the sounds these objects make. In English, for example, young children and their parents often refer to a locomotive as a "choo-choo."
A number of animals, especially birds, also get their names from the onomatopoeic link with the calls they make, such as the Chickidee, the Cuckoo, the Whooping Crane, and the Chiffchaff.

Onomatopoeias in pop culture
The image Whaam! by Roy Lichtenstein is one of the earliest examples of pop art, featuring a fighter aircraft firing a rocket into an enemy plane with a dazzling red and yellow explosion.

In Super Mario games, Thwomp is the sound that the big crush block makes, and is also the name of the monster. Whomp is Thwomp's brother, and WHOMP! is the onomatopia that Whomp would make.

The chorus of Kid Creole and the Coconuts' "Annie, I'm not Your Daddie"", is a repetition of the word "Onomatopoeia ".

Charlene, I am familiar with the term onomatopoeia, and "twittering" definitely fits the description. I think Gaby's reference to alliteration may also fit?...the "T" sound in Twittering and Trees. And now that we have analyzed this one to death, I still like the line and what it calls to mind. I'll leave the rest of the comments on alliteration, onomatopoeia, etc. to all of you more literarily educated.

[ September 02, 2005, 10:18: Message edited by: mnmouse ]

I agree with mn mouse. "...twitterin' in the trees, down below's a pond I know, you can swim in it if ya please" -- that's always been my favorite phrase from Summertime Dream.

I love onamatopoeia - and personification - Yarmouth Castle is fabulous for that.
and I do love twittering in the trees. many times when i am awakened by the birds in the front yard trees at 4 a.m. i calm myself by thinking of that line...lol