Will Shortz, doing the Sunday Puzzle this morning on NPR, asked what an Olympic swimming pool and a poem have in common. The answer: meter. Shortz: “A poem usually has meter.”
Uh, no.
Will Shortz’s blend of smarty-pants certitude and cluelessness (no pun intended) irks me whenever it surfaces. As it did this morning.
See also “Cool jazz pioneer”, nepenthe, and NOLIKEY.
Sunday, April 25, 2021
Will Shortz, enemy of free verse
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comments: 4
By his analogy the answer could also be: feet.
My most recent overheard metric is better than “imperial” measurements argument? “I use millimetres because they’re more precise than inches.”
He overestimates his authority on all things rules related. Many people a bit too much into games do. They tend to see rules as moral imperatives rather than guidelines to make interactions smoother.
Not all gamers, of course. The best ones know when rules can be bent or ignored completely.
Well, if you're defining meter as ta-da ta-da ta-da, that may be so, but Ezra Pound might define meter as the rhythm of speech, "In Retrospect," "As regarding rhythm: to compose in the sequence of the musical phrase, not in sequence of a metronome." William Carlos Williams called it "the metrical foot."
@shallnot: I wonder if the speaker was going for the idea of granularity.
@Zhoen: I’ve noticed that he’s even sometimes begrudging about alternative (valid) answers for Sunday puzzles.
@Geo-B: But doesn’t Pound distinguish the one from the other? (He also says “To break the pentameter, that was the first heave,” though he also wrote metrical poetry.) WCW refers to “the variable foot,” a term which, I admit, eludes me. (Someone once likened it to “the elastic inch.”) Non-metrical poetry certainly includes rhythm, as ordinary speech does. But metrical poetry, be definition, involves a pattern of one kind or another shaping every line. I think Will Shortz was on thin ice.
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