810-1: Feedback, Notes and Comments

Ruthless rhymes Many readers responded to my comments in the last issue about the difficulties poets have with rhyming words such as orange and month. George Steinberg commented, “Don’t forget songwriter Stephen Sondheim’s advice: ‘To rhyme a word like silver, / or any “rhymeless” rhyme, / requires only will, ver- / bosity and time.’” Other readers, including William Logan, pointed to this:

As long as he can grind em out, a dozen-or-so a month,

We’ll praise him to the nth degree, and to the n-plus-1th.
[On Reading John Hollander’s Poem “Breadth. Circle. Desert. Monarch. Month. Wisdom. (for which there are no rhymes)”, by George Starbuck, 2003.]

Mulct Pat Jakobi was among several readers who suggested another source: “My grandfather (born 1878 in Wisconsin) always complained about his boss milking the staff by working them hard and paying them little. The idea of someone taking fluids from a cow without permission and potentially with force certainly fits.” It does, but the Oxford English Dictionary’s recently revised entry for milk says otherwise, recording examples in the senses of deprive, defraud or exploit from the sixteenth century, three centuries before these senses were attached to mulct. The obvious connections with extracting milk from a cow, which has also led to phrases such as cash cow, were enough to suggest the idea in people’s minds.

Jonathan McColl e-mailed from Dingwall in Rossshire: “The Dingwall Burgh Council meeting minutes from 1708 record a landowner beating up the multurer at the main mill. I feel he was probably incensed at the fellow taking more than the normal bit off the top of any grain he was grinding in his mill, his multure. I assume this comes from the same root, and might dare say that’s one reason to mulct has rather a pejorative feel nowadays.” Yes, I’m sure the taking of excessive tolls or fees is part of the cause of the shift of mulct to its modern meaning of extortion. (Multure is a Scots word, based on the older spelling of mulct, which can be traced back to the early thirteenth century for a charge or toll made by a miller for grinding corn.)