An exchange this morning on Facebook:
Gadi Niram: I don’t know what the deeper meaning might be here, but “Klobuchar and Buttigieg” has the same stress pattern as “Rosencrantz and Guildenstern”.
Arnold Zwicky: A line of catalectic trochaic tetrameter – SW SW SW S — incredibly common in folk verse of all kinds, and elsewhere. Including: “Lord what fools these mortals be”. Not to mention one reading of: “Captain of our fairy band”. And, from a recent posting of mine: Lincoln Darwin Valentine.
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(#1) Captain of our fairy band, for Lincoln Darwin Valentine’s
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(#2) Drummer of our fairy band, Luis Illadres of Pansy Division, away from his drum kit to do a shirtless cock-tease (Myspace photo)
The two postings just alluded to:
— from 2/13/19, “Captain of our fairy band”, about:
Catalectic trochaic tetrameter: … 4 SW feet, except that the last foot is short.
— from 2/13/20, “Lincoln Darwin Valentine Day”
Two relevant postings on Pansy Division:
— from 12/16/12, “The gay underwear anthem”, about PD and their half-rhymes in “Groovy Underwear”
— from 4/16/17, “Out gay male bands”, with a section on PD and
their song “Anthem”: “We’re the buttfuckers of rock & roll / We wanna sock it to your hole” … Which sounds aggressive, but is, like almost all their music, cheerful and celebratorily gay.
And then from among earlier postings on the meter:
— from 3/20/14, “The lure of trochaic tetrameter”:
Trochees are everywhere in English, and tetrameter is the predominant meter for folk verse of all kinds.
— from 2/11/18, “Briefly: edible trochaic tetrameter”:
Thrée Meat Cróck Pot Cówboy Béans
— from 8/11/18, “P-alliterative and tetrametric lines”:
purple rainbow puppy pen (SW SW SW S)