A Qroq of Qraq
Q’s without U’s,
You’re not fooling me –
You’re out to confuse
With your Q’s floating free.
But I know you’re trick –
You’re just curly K’s,
With a kick and a click
To anchor a phrase.
Yet sometimes in French
At the end of a word,
A Q is what’s mentioned,
But K is what’s heard.
And Arabic’s full of ’em,
Inuit too,
With gutter and phlegm
To push the sound through –
Less plosive, more fricative,
That’s what it’s telling –
It’s purely indicative,
Snobbish in spelling –
For only a Scot could
Hope to pronounce it –
No Sassenach should,
They’ll mangle and trounce it.
And that’s not a problem,
It’s just how they speak –
They’re likely to drop them
Than rumble or squeak.
And why must we write down
These non-English letters
For non-English sounds,
So the cringing trend-setters
Can show how well-travelled
Their spellings display –
With words that unravelled
When struggled to say.
So spare the obtuse views
On grammatophones –
We’ve no use for loose Qs
Without chaperones.
The title is intended to be a play on ‘crock of craic’, but I had to ditch the superfluous k and i.
Rhyming Couplets 