
A little poem about how all is not as it seems in the English language. "Stormy petrel" is the name coined by one Elliott Moreton for those pairs of words which are always (or almost always) found together. The name refers to a bird called the stormy petrel, but oddly enough, "stormy petrel" is not, as was once believed, a stormy petrel—because there are other kinds of petrels—but the name persists. Often one part of the pair is an uncommon word that manages to survive parasitically with the other, more common one, but sometimes they're both uncommon and survive by banding together into a petrel. Source of the list (I didn't use a few of the more uncommon or harder-to-rhyme ones): www.kith.org Oh, and if anyone cares to share this in their English class or whatever, I will crap myself with glee. I seem to be one of the few people who knows about petrels and would love to see the term warrant, say, a Wikipedia entry.
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whyevernotso