conuly

linguaphiles.

Here's another link, with a video of another child singing the song, the cutest I've ever seen who wasn't actually a relative of mine!

(Interestingly enough, just on a tangent here, I know of two or three other versions of that rhyme that are standard nursery rhymes in English, that I often have seen in Mother Goose compilations, or elsewhere.)

The other day I picked up a used book, Shoes from Grandpa. It's a cute cumulative story about a girl who gets all sorts of clothes in rhymes.

Except the author is clearly not speaking my dialect here, because she makes some rhymes that I can't make. Scarf and laugh rhyming, I recognize (though for me to make the rhyme would mean changing the vowel in both words), but what really took me by surprise is when she rhyme blouse and bows (like something tied in a bow, not like somebody bowing down). No matter how I work it in my mind, I can't see how they rhyme! Unless one or both of those words is pronounced *very* differently over the pond, not just a little like the earlier example.

Any insight here?