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Rhyme as Reason

bigthink.com

34 pointssamclemens39 comments

I have a hypothesis that the reason humans are more likely to believe things that rhyme is because of the effort involved in creating the phrase. Comparing saying something vs saying something that rhymes, the latter takes more time, more effort, and you need to check that the end product makes sense. Whoever came up with the phrase probably put in a lot of thought.

Similarly, I think that humor is more convincing than simple words because, to come up with the punchline, the comedian must have looked at the situation from every available angle. The existence of humor is a costly signal that shows someone else really thought it through.

It seems you’re implying these signals are accurate, that this increased thought leads to actually more useful phrases. We’ve then adapted to remember these phrases more easily.

I don’t think that’s the case. It’s easier to remember all sorts of rhyming things besides advice. The article explains the semantic narrowing that accounts for it. “Blue shoe, red bed” is going to be easier to remember than “Green shoe, white bed”.

I actually take rhyming advice as a strong indicator of low quality. It is much, much easier to come up with a rhyme than to accurately find the effect, if any, between drink order and hangover. But, the rhyming sticks in people’s heads. This gives it a free pass. Non-rhyming phrases, non-beautiful phrases, have to survive on their own merit.

I took it not so much that the increased thought leads to more useful phrases, but that people are more likely to exert this effort toward things they think are useful, rather than lies.

You are going to remember "righty-tighty, lefty-loosey" better than "blue shoe, red bed" because you think it more useful. And you are vastly more likely to put effort into teaching the former to others.

When designing rhymes less for your own benefit and more for others, like advertising slogans, this obviously doesn't hold as well.

You might be an exception, an outlier, like many on HN, in regards to this effect. What applies to most people is more probable not to apply to me or you because we're self selected here, a bubble. This is given you're not either bluffing or constructed an illusory belief.

My reasoning for disbelieving that valuing rhyming advice is a human adaptation from experiencing high quality rhyming advice stands on its own, separate from my reasoning for personally devaluing rhyming advice.

If they said that part of the reason that rhyming advice is sticky is people mistakenly believe that more effort went it to, that seems right.

From the Boston Globe circa 2010:

Easy = True https://web.archive.org/web/20100909221602/https://www.bosto...

Not sure why the original article is gone.

That's not usually how comedy writing works. While some comics may write a bit from hundreds of different angles, most I've written with find it hard to deviate from a specific take after it has occured to them, whether or not the audience finds it funny. Bad comedic writing vs good comedic writing isn't about exploring every angle, it's about digging deeply into the angle that you find funniest, which is usually an instant, undefined perception.

I have 0 proof for this and am not a scientist, but hypothesize that our brains have evolved to enjoy rhyme because it’s an error correcting mechanism, like a parity bit. This way information can be more reliably passed on through generations.

This was a shower thought a couple weeks ago which was also discussed here (3 comments) https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=39942137.

> One day, a talented lass or fellow, a special one with face of yellow, will make the Piece of Resistance found from it's hiding refuge underground, and with a noble army at the helm, this Master Builder will thwart the Kragle and save the realm, and be the greatest, most interesting, most important person of all times. All this is true because it rhymes.

The Lego Movie.

Reminds me of the shudder of fear that "stranger danger" induces in parents, even though evidence suggests massively more risk to children is from those known to them. Stranger danger also ties in with other recall aspects reinforcing it further.

The bulk of Sanskrit literature, including everything technical — astronomy, mathematics, philosophy, politics, etc — is in metrical verse. This was true both when things were primarily passed down orally, and when writing/printing was more widespread. Verse truly makes things more memorable.

Probably a good thing too, because whatever you learn that rhymes, there will be a criticism that also rhymes. Seems like the cognitive bias matters mostly when some things use rhyme, but others don't.

It's also interesting to see cultural differences here (partly coming from the respective languages themselves):

• In English, rhyming/versification is relatively limited, and (so?) rhyme is dismissed as for less-serious poetry/“doggerel”, and the reactions to this article are along the lines of seeing rhyming information as low-quality, and the memorability of verse as a problem,

• From experience with Sanskrit which lends itself very well to versification (both the nature of the language itself, and the nature of education which emphasized facility with language), and “serious” works are in metrical verse, I tend more to see this memorability of verse as an underutilized useful tool rather than a problem. (My father, teaching within an education system that requires students to memorize lists and reproduce them in the exam, used to compose rhyming verses for his students to remember e.g. points of law like the definition of a breach-of-contract: I imagine both he and several of his students still remember several of those from decades ago.)

There's a lot of interest on HN in things like spaced repetition; I would have imagined “make a memorable verse out of it” would be in a similar category but cultural/linguistic barriers seem to prevent it.

Maybe it was a form of error correction

Doesn't the same apply to all rhetorical devices, not just rhyming? And by extension, doesn't all advertising fall in the same category?

This reads like someone read Schopenhauer, and now they're trying to sound smart without spilling their secret.

I'm disappointed that tricolon has fallen out of popular use in favour of simple pairs, eg "strong and stable"; the former requires three pairwise agreements among its constituents, the latter but one.

(the B'rer Rabbit stories also have a triple pattern: instead of just contrasting here to there, Uncle Remus is always talking about this over here, that over there, and those over yonder)

  I am a rhetorician
  You are a copywriter
  They display rhyming play

(might GPT use bring back tricolon even among lazy speechwriters?)

I learned in college:

Liquor before beer, you're in the clear. Beer before liquor, feel better quicker.

In driver's ed class we were give the assignment to come up with safety-related rhymes.

I remember one from a friend named Roger.

"Keep your eyes off the foxes, or your car will end up like boxes."

I wonder in how many languages that advise exists in rhymed form. Here is the German version:

Bier auf Wein, Lass es sein. Wein auf Bier, Das rat ich dir!

Does someone know a French, Italien, or Russian ?

« Femme qui rit, à moitié dans ton lit »

Chi va piano va sano (e va lontano)

Лес рубят, щепки летят.

(would Bill & Ted have caught on better if they'd rhymed? "Have a ball; excellence to all")

oops, had parsed as "that (advice exists) in", not "(that advice) exists in" ... nvm

Dutch has it, but isn’t like the German version:

Wijn na bier geeft plezier, bier na wijn geeft venijn.

Beer before liquor, never been sicker. Liquor before beer, you're in the clear.

Anyone care to speculate why humans like rhymes in the first place? They do feel meaningful and important, but why?

It’s a compression format.

Having to explicitly remember (page 100, para 30) taxes memory.

Since Brains are pattern recognition systems a pattern that can be easily decompressed and used to predict the next verse reduces cognitive burden.

- Human brains do not store information in a format that can simply be traversed and recalled instantly.

- We rebuild specific memories, based on associated precursors or memories.

- The text vs audio vs touch distinction is irrelevant to a brain. Your brain will remember whatever you felt when you read Hamlet, including the sounds of the words or the smell of your bed room.

- short term recall is 7-9 ‘things’.

- Long term, short term and medium memory function at the same time (parallel, not sequential)

In a nutshell, it’s cheaper to use multiple systems to rebuild the information.

This is pure speculation: I suspect our ancestors used music + simple words for communication long before we evolved modern human language. Although language outstripped music in terms of its precision and utility, as an evolutionary hangover we have a preference for language with musical qualities.

Some """evidence""" for this claim:

- The most interesting fact is that gibbons sing similarly to humans, intentionally targeting a pure tone so other gibbons can harmonize in octaves. They seem to use this for bonding and communicating their vocal state. So there's precedent for musical communication in one of our closest relatives.

- Music seems useful for hominids: just like modern humans, our pre-language ancestors possibly used "work songs" as a way for large groups of foragers to ping their status. Prairie dogs do the same with their chattering - if one critter goes quiet, the rest quickly realize something is wrong. There is no evidence that human language evolved after human music, but it seems more reasonable to me than the alternative.

- On the other hand, it's well-known that modern humans can be easily misled by speakers who use intellectual affectations to spritz up nonsense, and in general we tend to make lazy judgments about speakers and accept/deny their arguments accordingly. So, assuming this quirk didn't evolve very recently, I could see how "uses language musically" has the same (dishonest) social signal of intelligence as "uses big words all fancy-like," simply because 400,000 years ago the most musically talented hominids commanded the most social authority (even maybe when they shouldn't).

Intelligence loves patterns. It's a natural form of data compression and error checking.

A rhyme's meaning is afforded,

as long as it isn't contorted.

But some might deny,

as the rhyme might belie;

The truth of the subject distorted.

I wonder if this has any connection to the appeal of rap music, and rap as a medium for spreading a message.

https://www.thekeyunlocks.us/p/it-rhymes-for-a-reason

...A verse without rhythm's

all distance, no meter

Like rhythm without time

all coffin, no cedar

All beats, without heart

all prose

and no art

-istry...

Or perhaps a slightly more complementary quote from the above:

Rhyme without Reason's like trees without seasons

blown out like the leaves when winter whispers her treasons

believe in the seas, sun, and birds, sung in thirds

to accord in their chorus

Winter is coming

and Ursa Majora...

its because rhymed words make tongue palate seal induces nasal breathing clearance which oxygen is a drug

“Beer before wine and you’ll feel fine; wine before beer and you’ll feel queer.”

"Beer before liquor, you've never felt sicker. Liquor before beer, you're in the clear."

Good example of people believing nonsense because it rhymes.

It's good advice to not take shots after you're already drinking.

Even for mixed drinks, the ABV can vary a lot more compared to lagers, pilsners, etc. The sugar content can be quite a bit higher in mixed drinks as well.

since both beer and wine differ, both in alcohol and sugar/carbohydrate contents, it's not all the same. Also high spirit liquor(37%+) is very different than wine (sub 14.5%).

A large part of the hangover is the dehydration which depends on both alcohol and sugars; as a general rule you want more water.

But have you tried while rhyming it?

Mend it, don't end it.

TLDR:

Rhyme advice may feel fine but following it might make you whine.

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