April is National Poetry Month. Today is April Fool's Day. I had an idea for something fun to do today, but ended up getting pranked by the English language instead.

Since I recently figured out how to find antonyms in wordnet, I thought I'd combine that with the CMU phonetic dictionary to find antonyms that rhyme, a resource for ironic poets everywhere.

But I didn't really think about how English works, so I got a list of uninteresting rhymes. E.g., uninteresting and interesting are definitely antonyms and definitely rhyme, but if you tried to use them as rhymes in a poem, all the other poets would make fun of you. Words that have the same role in the language, albeit with different meaning, often have the same suffix. It's not so interesting that bluntness and sharpness rhyme; after staring at enough "ironic" rhymes like these, it seems more interesting that strength and weakness don't rhyme. Shouldn't weankth be a word? Maybe there are some interesting rhymes buried in this mess somewhere, but I ain't gonna dig for them.

abolish establish
absent present
acidity alkalinity
addition subtraction
adjective substantive
altruism egoism
analysis synthesis
annual biennial
antecedent subsequent
appointive elective
aqueous igneous
arm disarm
artificially naturally
attach detach
…

Anyhow, happy April, everybody. Don't worry; I don't plan to write a poem every day this month.