![[personal profile]](https://www.dreamwidth.org/img/silk/identity/user.png){kind=small}
But the Flames Went Higher
I was singing "Ring of Fire" this morning, and I love that song for a lot of reasons, but one reason is the refrain and the way it uses the vowels in the word "fire." Normally, you would try to avoid singing the word fire, because to make an R sound, you basically crumple in your entire mouth, which is not good for volume or resonance, and secondly that is a very back-of-the-throat i-sound, or not even back of the throat -- back of the palate. It gets extremely nasal. So you're going F (mouth closed) i (nasal) R (crumplemouth). Say it out loud and you'll see what I mean. Not great.
Not so in "Ring of Fire," which specifically manipulates this problem by working with regional accent variations. In the chorus, you get two of them in the same line:
". . . and it burns, burns, burns,
that ring of FIE-YUR, that ring of FAHR."
It turns the first fire into a kind of dipthong yodel and trades out the nasal i for a low-throat resonant A in the second one. And these are both valid spoken pronunciations I have heard and used whilst in the South! (Fahr is very West Texas, although not solely West Texas. FIE-yur or FIE-ER (both syllables equally stressed) is more common in Dallas.) It is not contrived at all! Such is the beauty of language.
When I was in I think middle school, we had to write haikus or something, and the teacher marked me off because "fire is only one syllable; just look it up in the dictionary." Whatever, Yankee. Fire is so much more than that.
Not so in "Ring of Fire," which specifically manipulates this problem by working with regional accent variations. In the chorus, you get two of them in the same line:
". . . and it burns, burns, burns,
that ring of FIE-YUR, that ring of FAHR."
It turns the first fire into a kind of dipthong yodel and trades out the nasal i for a low-throat resonant A in the second one. And these are both valid spoken pronunciations I have heard and used whilst in the South! (Fahr is very West Texas, although not solely West Texas. FIE-yur or FIE-ER (both syllables equally stressed) is more common in Dallas.) It is not contrived at all! Such is the beauty of language.
When I was in I think middle school, we had to write haikus or something, and the teacher marked me off because "fire is only one syllable; just look it up in the dictionary." Whatever, Yankee. Fire is so much more than that.