Valentine Verse: a rant.

Roses are red
Violets are blue,
Sugar is sweet
And so are you.

Excuse me a moment, I'm feeling a little nauseated...

...deep breath...

....OK. I can do this.

That horrible sugary little rhyme has many variations, all of them rubbish. It even has a Folk Song Index Number (it's 19798. Yes, that is a lot of folk songs).

And in any case roses are very often not red, and violets are, well, violet. 

It was Sir Edmund Spencer who first seems to have come up with the roses are red, violets are blue line (in The Faerie Queene) and by the end of the 1700s the line had become part of a nursery rhyme (which are allowed to be nonsense).

Whether Victor Hugo knew about either of these sources I don't know, but in Les Misérables he came up with a French version that actually makes sense:

Les bleuets sont bleus, les roses sont roses...

The cornflowers are blue, the roses are pink...

And you know something? Murmuring something in French might even have some effect on a sweetheart, especially if he or she doesn't understand French. And even if he or she does, then, as the rest of the verse involves a bit of shopping for very pretty things while walking along the streets, it still might just do the trick:

Nous achèterons de bien belles choses
En nous promenant le long des faubourgs
Les bleuets sont bleus, les roses sont roses,
Les bluets sont bleus, J'aime mes amours.

Well, Roses are red isn't going to get you anywhere, is it?

Word To Use Today: rose. This word has meant, well, rose, for over a thousand years. The old Greek form is rhodon.