Practical Rhyme

Light On Light Through · Aug 15, 2007

I was thinking about rhymes - not poetry, necessarily, but just rhyming, and how it originated in our history, in our language.

Marshall McLuhan provides a clue, as he does for so much in communication: lots of things that we regard as art forms or sports, McLuhan says, started out as very practical technologies. For example, horseback riding was once just a practical way to travel. The automobile made horseback riding into a sport, even an art-form.

I first heard McLuhan say this back in the mid-1970s. Since then, I've come with examples of my own. For example - delicatessen. Ham and corned…