Billy: Hello.

Adrianne: Hey, Billy! 

Regina: Hi!

John: Hello, Billy.

Billy: When I say the words, “Google’s featured snippets,” you all know what I’m talking about, right?

Regina: It’s like the OneBox.

Adrianne: Oh, absolutely. This is something I’ve built my career around. 

Billy: Okay. Yes. 

Adrianne: I’m pretty sure the audience knows what they are because everyone uses Google and they’re at the top of Google search results. And it’s basically a little box highlighted at the top of search results with an answer to maybe the thing that you Googled, but it’s just grabbed, excerpted from a random website.

Billy: Yeah, it’s Google’s AI extracting the answer from the search results, and these will also be the answers you often get on a Google a smart device, like a Nest Hub.

Adrianne: Yeah. Well, we did a story about them. I think at The Outline we did a video about them because sometimes they’re really dumb and it’s funny, but also a little bit scary and disturbing because you realize how much of a gatekeeper Google is for information now.

Regina: Right. 

Billy: Yes. So here are some answers from that video that we worked on at The Outline back in 2017.

Adrianne: Are dolphins aliens? 

Google Home: According to Weekly World News, Beijing dolphins are the descendants of aliens that came to earth as UFOs 100,000 years ago, the leading researcher reports.

Adrianne: Where’s Tupac hiding?

John: Oh yeah.

Google Home: According to Now 88 News, the article states Tupac Shakur, who was supposedly killed at the age of 25, is now admitting he has been hiding this whole time.

Adrianne: What does iodine smell like?

Google Home: According to Quora, when I made meth, I used hydrogen peroxide and hydrochloric acid to precipitate the iodine out of 7% strong iodine.

Adrianne: This is the best one.

Google Home: This process had to be done in a chicken poop because the smell would be noticed if it was in the home or garage.

Billy: So, recently I noticed a featured snippet on Google that was uniquely offensive to me. 

Adrianne: Uh-oh.

Billy: If you search the question, “who rhymed orange with a word?” or if you search the question, “who first rhymed orange with a word”?

Adrianne: Uh huh.

Billy: Google will return a simple answer, very prominently at the top. So take a look.

Adrianne: Okay. 

John: I like this. It says, “who rhymed orange with a word?” and the Google box says, Eminem.

Billy: Yes. And it says the same thing if you search, “who first rhymed orange with a word?”. 

John: Eminem.

Billy: Eminem! Of course.

John: Groundbreaking.

Billy: These featured snippets change sometimes, and then they might go away entirely so I’ve included screenshots in the show notes in case they change. But both of these questions the answer that Google provides, ultimately they both point to the same thing to support their claim, which is a  60 Minutes interview that Eminem did with Anderson Cooper in 2010.

Anderson Cooper: I’ve heard you say you bend the word.

Eminem: Yeah. It’s just in the enunciation of it, like people say that… the word “orange” doesn’t rhyme with anything, and that kind of pisses me off because I can think of a lot of things that rhyme with “orange.”

Anderson Cooper: What rhymes with “orange”? 

Eminem: If you’re taking the word at face value, and you just say “orange,” nothing is going to rhyme with it exactly. If you enunciate it and you make it like more than one syllable, “orange” you could say like…”I put my orange four-inch door hinge in storage and ate porridge with George.”

Billy: I put my orange four-inch door hinge in storage and ate porridge with George.

Regina: Yeah. The “George” bothers me everytime. 

John: “Door hinge” is the only one of those that comes remotely close to rhyming, I think.

Billy: Yes!

Regina: I think it’s when you say them in that order though, you kind of like get, you know, you get carried along until you get to George and then it’s just—

Billy: But I agree, “door hinge” is the one that works. It’s the one that stands out to me. 

John: Yeah. 

Billy: But the idea that Eminem is getting credit for rhyming “orange” with “door hinge” is blasphemy. 

Regina: How so?

Billy: I have a very distinct memory of someone pointing out that “door hinge” rhymes with “orange” but it was not a human being. 

John: Was it Google?

Billy: No, it was a puppet on the television show Under the Umbrella Tree.

Adrianne: What is Under the Umbrella Tree?

Billy: So none of you have seen Under the Umbrella Tree?

Adrianne: Nope.

Regina: No.

John: No.

Billy: Under the Umbrella Tree was a Canadian children’s television show that originally ran from 1986 to 1993 on CBC. 

And then it was syndicated on the Disney Channel in the United States from 1990 to 1997, which is where I experienced it. 

Television voices: The jokes never end. Roses are red. Violets are blue and sugar is sweet and I have green feet. 

When you’re Under the Umbrella Tree.

Billy: I was born in 1988. So, probably I would have been, you know, somewhere between the ages of 1 and 9 when it was on the air. And something about the show was very formative to me. 

It only ran on television for a very narrow window of time. It wasn’t syndicated on any other channels outside of that time period. And my personal window for watching it was even smaller because my household didn’t always have the Disney Channel around this time. Sometimes, it was special like the cable provider would provide it for free for a week.

Harry Anderson: Hi, I’m Harry Anderson. You know, some people have it easy, they really do. While the rest of us run around trying to keep our kids entertained all summer, they turn to the Disney Channel.

Billy: It was a premium channel at the time, I think, sort of like HBO.

Harry Anderson: So come on! It’s summertime and the living is easy. Easy as calling 1-800-847-9000 to subscribe to the Disney Channel.

Billy: I think I was just soaking up the show whenever I could get access to it. But regardless of the amount of time it was available for me or anyone else, it seems like it was an extremely influential show for many people, my age. 

It was kind of unique as a show for like preschool aged children, because it was more like a sitcom than other shows made for little kids. 

Here is Lena Dunham, who said this was her favorite show, and she’s two years older than me. Here’s her talking about it with Alec Baldwin.

Lena Dunham: I’d always been obsessed with TV. I’d always loved TV and found it to be the most sort of comforting medium. And the one that—

Alec Baldwin: What comforted you on TV? 

Lena Dunham: What comforted me on TV was there was a range of things that comforted me on TV. I love—

Alec Baldwin: You’re getting weird. 

Lena Dunham: What was the—

John: Doing the shweaty balls thing, but not a joke.

Lena Dunham: My favorite show when I was little was, Under the Umbrella Tree, which is a Canadian show about a woman who lives with three puppets. And it was on every morning at 7:00 AM. 

Alec Baldwin: Good god.

Lena Dunham: There were three of them named Iggy, Gloria and Jay. And Iggy was an iguana, Gloria is a groundhog and Jay is a bluejay and he lives out back in a birdhouse. They like to talk to you about recycling, or help their old elderly neighbor who fell down in the street. They’re just like nice puppets.

Billy: Gloria is actually a gopher by the way, not a groundhog, but—

John: Uh, Lena?

Regina: Get it together.

Billy: But despite Under the Umbrella Trees’ influence, nothing about it is well-documented online. The IMDb pages are basically empty. There aren’t even any episodes listed out on IMDb, and only a limited selection of episodes have been made publicly available either on DVD or on the internet or elsewhere.

And if you search combinations of Under the Umbrella Tree with “door hinge” and orange— 

Adrianne: Oh right, I forgot what this was about. I thought I was fully immersed in Under the Umbrella Tree and forgot about the whole reason we were talking about it. Okay. So they rhymed orange with door hinge?

Billy: They rhymed orange with door hinge, at least in my memory. And if you search for this on Google, you get somewhere between 5 and 6 results total.

John: I’ve never searched for anything that got 5 or 6 results.

Billy: Well, like half of them are just random keyword spam. But of the real results, there are two offhanded mentions in comments on Reddit. And then there is one mentioned in a Yahoo Answers thread where someone asked, “what word rhymes with orange?” Someone suggests “door hinge,” and then another person replies, “I vaguely remember seeing that door hinge thing on some kid’s show. Maybe it was Under the Umbrella Tree? Is that where you heard it too?” 

Regina: Wow.

Billy: And there is no precise date on this comment, but the timestamp just says two decades ago.

Regina: Wow.

Billy: So —

John: Strange.

Billy: So my question is, where is the outrage?

Regina: Wait, sorry, what is the outrage? 

Billy: Eminem?!

Regina: Eminem was getting credit for this Canadian puppet?

Billy: Eminem was getting credit! And it was said Under the Umbrella Tree!

Regina: Do you think Under the Umbrella Tree was the original source? 

Adrianne: Yeah.

Regina: Like they didn’t get it somewhere?

Adrianne: You’re telling me that no one ever rhymed door hinge with orange before 20 years ago?

John: Well, okay, well, let’s set here the possibility that he stole it, how old is Eminem?

Billy: He was born in 1972.

Adrianne: Oh, I see. You’re trying to pick beef with Eminem on this podcast. 

Regina: Right.

Billy: No, no. This isn’t like—

Regina: So you think that Eminem stole this from a Canadian kid’s show and then took credit for it? He appropriated it?

Billy: My point is that Eminem seems to repeatedly get credit for this online. But I know in my heart, it is my personal truth that he did not come up with this. He was not the first to rhyme with orange and he very specifically was not the first to do it with door hinge. 

Here’s what I want to find out; does this scene from Under the Umbrella Tree really exist? And if it does, why is Eminem getting all the credit for rhyming orange with door hinge?

Regina: Coming up, Billy loses himself in the story.

Hi, listener! It’s Regina. I know by now you probably heard about our Patreon before but just in case you haven’t, it is a magical place where you can support our show. It means a lot because we are very indie. We make all of this content in our free time, and by subscribing to us you can not only, you know, help us pay for the technical stuff that makes this show possible, but you also get fun things out of it too. You get access to our entire second podcast called Overunderstood. 

This week’s episode was soundtracked by Hoobastank, it explored hibernation, TikTok, sleep paralysis— I don’t really know how to explain the thread there without listening to the episode, so maybe you just do that. Anyways, you get all of that for just $5 a month and we release the episode of Overunderstood every single week even when the main show is on a break. 

Also, as a Patreon you can join our Discord channel where we hang out with other listeners, and talk about life, and the internet and whatever else people talk about.  

If you want to join, go to patreon.com/underunderstood and either way, thank you for listening to the show. Making it is really the most fun thing that we do and we’re just grateful that other people enjoy it too. Thanks!

Billy: We’re back!

Adrianne: Oh!

John: Thank god. 

Adrianne: Hello there!

Regina: Hi.

Billy: So, this is one of those stories where I started it. I hit some dead ends. I dropped it for a long time. 

Regina: Years?

Billy: Years. 

John: Yeah. How long has it been?

Billy: Over two years.

Regina: This is Underunderstood 001. 

Billy: This is the first story I tried to do on the show. 

John: Oh my God.

Adrianne: Before we had any idea what the show was going to be.

John: And we’ve evolved so little that we can air it now.

Adrianne: Yes. Okay. So did you get anywhere?

Billy: Well, for starters, I think an important first step in proving that Eminem didn’t do this first is to establish a clear timeline of what he actually did do. So that interview on 60 Minutes, that was from 2010, but he actually rhymed orange with door hinge before that. And I found this because Genius made a video where they compiled all the times Eminem rhymed orange with something. 

The Genius video went massively viral. It’s their fourth-most viewed video on YouTube with 26 million views. Also, I should probably do a full disclaimer here, Regina—

Regina: Yes, I was wondering if that was coming up.

Billy: Regina and I both worked at Genius to help launch the video team over there. And I believe that this video was made while you were still running the team, right Regina? 

Regina: Yes.

Billy:  Also Eminem is an investor in Genius so…but Eminem wasn’t involved in the video. Your team just did that on their own.

Regina: Yes.

Billy: Anyway, that video points out that Eminem rhymed door hinge with four-inch and orange before. And he did it in the song Brain Damage, which is from the Slim Shady LP.

Eminem: Then I got up and ran to the janitor storage booth, kicked the door hinge loose and ripped out the four-inch screws, grabbed some sharp objects, brooms, and foreign tools, this is for every time you took my orange juice.

Billy: So he rhymes “kicked the door hinge loose” with “you took my orange juice.” And that was released in 1999. My point here is that Eminem had an earlier example than the 2010 interview on CBS, but not earlier than Under the Umbrella Tree.

Adrianne: Okay.

Billy: So with that out of the way, I wanted to confirm that my memory of Under the Umbrella Tree was valid.

Adrianne: Right.

Billy: So I talked to my sister who is two years older than me. 

Lisa: Hi Billy. 

Billy: We used to watch the show together. And I asked her if she remembered a character on Under the Umbrella Tree, rhyming orange with door hinge.

Lisa: Yeah. I remember that. I remember that I know it from Under the Umbrella Tree, not necessarily that I remember the episode, but, you know, I knew what rhymed with orange and I was pretty sure it was because of that show.

Billy: Oh, wow. Okay. So it stuck with you too?

Lisa: Yeah! 

Billy: Do you think you would have remembered it? If I didn’t bring it up? Like, if someone just said what runs with orange, you would have remembered it?

Lisa: Oh, I would definitely would know what rhymes with orange. For sure it’s door hinge. But I am pretty sure that I would know that I know it because of Under the Umbrella Tree.

Adrianne: Can either of you remember what the tune was? I’m assuming this was a song. No it wasn’t a song?  

Billy: No, it wasn’t a song. It was something like they pointed out the fact that there’s nothing that runs with the orange, and then one of the characters realized that door hinge rhymes with it.

Regina: How does the character realize that?

Billy: Well, I don’t know, but now I have my sister involved and she hits all of the same dead ends that I did.

Adrianne: And she’s a super Googler.

Billy: She is.

Lisa: There’s not much as far as like there’s no episode guides or things like that, which is frustrating because I used to like, you know, everything has documentation pretty much on the internet. 

There’s scripts and there’s YouTube and there’s somebody’s fan page. It’s very strange to not be able to track something down like that.

Billy: This is where I start questioning if this is something that actually happened, or if I imagined it. You know, like if it’s a Mandela effect. Something that me, my sister and upwards of two people on Reddit, all falsely remembered together. 

So, I called up someone who might know a little bit more first hand.

Kathy: Hello?

Billy: Hello, Kathy? 

Kathy: Hi!

Billy: Hi, this is Billy. How are you?

Kathy: I’m fine. How are you? 

Billy: Good. 

That’s Kathy McClellan, she’s a writer, actor, and puppeteer, and she worked on Under the Umbrella Tree with its creator, Noreen Young.

Kathy: I met Noreen Young at a puppeteers conference. She talked to me about her show and I was very excited about it. And at the time, my husband and I had just had a baby, so I was even more excited about kids’ TV. And eventually Noreen invited me to write for it, and I just started writing. I think I wrote a total of 43 episodes. 

Billy: Oh wow. 

Kathy: Besides that, there were a couple of seasons where I was on the set and my job was to get the puppets dressed for their next scene. So that was a lot of fun.

Billy: Three are over 200 episodes of Under the Umbrella Tree. 

Regina: Wow. 

John: Oh wow. 

Billy: So Kathy only wrote a fraction of them, but still, she was very familiar with every aspect of the show.

Kathy: So I was like the biggest fan. I was watching it and recording every single episode.

Billy: So, maybe you will be helpful with—

Kathy: Of course it was 30 years ago, but—

Billy: So I start to tell Kathy a bit about this journey that I’ve been on. 

We noticed that if you search “who rhymed orange with a word,” Google will give you a pretty simple answer. Eminem, the recording artist Eminem.

Kathy: Oh, yes. Okay.

Billy: Do you have any clue where I’m going with this yet?

Kathy: Uh…no.

Billy: Okay. At this point, I play the  60 Minutes’ clip for Kathy over the phone. She finds it amusing. And then I try to explain where I’m actually going with all of this. 

I had a distinct memory of a character from a TV show, rhyming orange with door hinge. 

Kathy: Right, right. It’s ringing a bell with me too. And I think I remember seeing the script when I was working on the prop. I kind of have a visual memory of it. Yeah. I think you’re right.

Billy: Wow. Okay.

Kathy: So I— this wasn’t one of my scripts.

Billy: Okay. You would remember it if it was.

Kathy: Yes. I’m pretty sure that was in the script that was written by Bob Stutt.

Billy: Okay. And why is that? Why do you think it was one of his scripts?

Kathy: Oh, I don’t know. It’s just the feeling I have. I just have this association of that kind of joke coming from Bob. 

Billy: Right. 

Kathy: Yes.

Billy: Got it.

Adrianne: What’s Bob up to?

Billy: Well, he lives in Canada so, logically I called up Bob.

Bob: Hello?

Billy: Hello? Hi, is this Bob?

Bob: This is Bob.

Billy: And I asked Bob about his involvement with Under the Umbrella Tree.

Bob: We’re going back quite a ways, so it was 1986 to 1991 or 1992, I think.

I puppeteered Iggy Iguana, who was the green lizard on the show. And I wrote about 80 of the episodes. We shot 300 episodes. I wrote about 80 of them. 

Billy: Oh, wow. 

Bob: The interesting thing for me was I had worked for years with the producer and creator of the show, Noreen Young. And so the part was sort of written for me, which was really nice. 

Because we were shooting in Ottawa, away from Toronto, we were sort of left alone and it was great, you know, Noreen Young, the producer, and also played Gloria on the show, was great at sort of giving us a rope and letting us go with it.

I remember writing for Sesame Street one time and had a character who picks up a banana and answers it like a telephone. And they made me cut that because they were afraid that kids were going to put bananas in their ears.

Billy: What? That’s a classic bit.

Bob: Yeah!

Billy: As much as I wanted to talk about what Bob was and wasn’t allowed to do on the Canadian version of Sesame Street, I’d obviously called him for a reason. 

I’m going to ask you a question and it might seem a little strange.

Bob: Okay.

Billy: Do you know of anything that rhymes with the word orange?

Bob: Well, yeah, there you go. There’s an Umbrella Tree script right there.

Billy: Okay. So you maybe know where I’m going with this?

Bob: Was that my script or was that Kathy’s? I wonder. I’m going to say “door hinge”.

Billy: Yes. Door hinge! Yes. Okay. All right. You know where I am going. Okay.

John: Yeah, we stole that from Eminem. Yeah.

Billy: So like I did with Kathy, I played Bob the clip from the  60 Minutes interview.

Eminem: I put my orange four-inch door hinge in storage, and ate porridge with George. 

Billy: For me, seeing this, it was strange to see Eminem almost universally get credit on the internet for this rhyme because I, personally, have a distinct memory of a character from a TV show, rhyming orange with door hinge. And of course that TV show is Under the Umbrella Tree.

Bob: Wow.

Billy: I talked to Kathy.

Bob: Yeah.

Billy: And she didn’t remember it.

Bob: Okay. 

Billy: But she said it seemed like something you might write.

Bob: I would hate to take credit for it and it wasn’t mine because— but that’s— I certainly do have a memory of doing it, but again, we’re talking well, 30 years ago now.

Billy: Yeah. 

Adrianne: Hmm…okay? 

Billy: So Bob remembers it, but not well enough to definitively take credit for it.

John: And does he know what episode it was?

Billy: No. But something else had happened in the meantime. My sister had not given up on this quest. Even though over two years and one global pandemic had happened since I first brought it up to her, the “orange-door hinge” found a way of working itself back into her life.

Lisa: My friend groups kind of have been doing a lot of online game meetups.

Billy: Yeah. 

Lisa: But lately one of my friends, Matt, he’s been trying to put together a trivia night for everyone. And one question was related to what two word rhyme did Eminem have for orange?

 And when we were playing trivia, I’m like, “guys, it’s door hinge,” and they’re all like, “I don’t know. Maybe it’s something like—” 

“No, it’s definitely a door hinge.” So, we got that one right. But after that, it was in my head again. And like I said, I am pretty sure I remember it from Under the Umbrella Tree. And I hate when I can’t prove things to myself. So I started searching again.

Billy: Lisa starts diving back into any and everything that she can find online.

Lisa: There were no episode guides, but some people had tried to list episode titles. So I found some episode title lists, and I thought I could target episodes that sounded relevant to either rhyming or singing. 

I had this feeling that it was a contest, so I was looking for contests, rhyming, singing, things like that. But Encore didn’t title the episodes so I ended up having to open each of those and they at least had a kind of a description I would look at.

Billy: Here she’s talking about Encore+, which is a nonprofit streaming service in Canada that licenses classic Canadian television and film, and puts them on YouTube.

John: Why do we not have this in the U.S.?

Billy: Again, yeah, I know. I think we should get healthcare first, but once we get that, we should get Encore+.

Regina: Maybe kind of at the same time.

Billy: Yeah. I mean, ideally.

John: The same bill. 

Adrianne: The 2021 Universal Health Care and Encore+ Act.

Regina: Health care and streaming.

Billy: But Encore+ only put a limited selection of episodes up. Still, Lisa spends a ton of time going through them.

Lisa: I don’t know. Once I start, I can’t stop until I figure the answer out. 

I got kind of a couple layers deep into YouTube. I was no longer on official channels. I was on channels that don’t use the words Under the Umbrella Tree and the titles cause they’re hiding.

Billy: How did you find those?

Lisa: I think YouTube was starting to recommend them to me at this point.

Billy: Oh, okay. The algorithm knows.

Lisa: Yeah, the algorithm figured it out, and I just jumped from recommendation to recommendation until I found one unofficial playlist that had some of the titles I was looking for. And one of the titles I think, something like Jacob’s World Record or something like that. I’m like, this is going to be it. I know it. And yep. It was right.

Puppet voices: Rhyming.

Adrianne: Are we listening to it?

Billy: We’re listening to it. 

John: Oh, my god. 

Puppet voices: Rhyming. 

What do you mean?

To set a world record is my dream! 

You’re going to rhyme everything we say? 

Not only that, but I’ll do it all day! 

Gloria, I think you can!

Thanks Jay! You’re my biggest fan. 

Would anyone like a piece of orange? 

Orange…orange..morange…oh..oh my! I can’t think of a word that rhymes with orange! 

Oh. Sorry, Jacob, I don’t think there is a word that rhymes with orange. 

Nice try Jake. 

This record stuff is harder than I thought. Give me some time to think though. I’ll come up with a world record idea yet! 

Good luck! 

He really wants to set a world record. 

Now, would anyone like a piece of orange? 

No, not now. I have to fix the door hinge.

Iggy! You just made a rhyme for orange! 

I did? 

You did? 

I said orange, you said door hinge. Orange, door hinge! 

Yeah. Maybe I can set a world record! 

Maybe, if you fix the squeaky door first? 

Right! 

Regina: Wow.

Billy: So this was uploaded within the last six months. Well, after we first started looking. I think it’s like a VHS recording that someone uploaded— digitized and then uploaded, you know, it’s not nearly as good quality as the officially released ones. And it doesn’t have full credits on the end. Like the new ones do that have been uploaded. But, I wrote to Noreen Young, creator of Under the Umbrella Tree.

And asked if she could confirm that this episode was written by Bob Stutt and she replied, 

Hello, Billy Disney. As you’ve requested, I’ve checked to see who wrote the Under the Umbrella Tree episode entitled Jacob’s World Record. And it was 100% Bob Stutt who was the writer.

Regina: Well.

Billy: So, I played the clip for Bob on the phone.

Bob: Take that Eminem.

Billy: Yeah. Right? 

Bob: He probably watched the show when he was a kid, too.

Billy: Well that’s one of the things I’m wondering. So, this would have been— what year do you think this would have been?

Bob: Well, would have been, yeah, early 90s that it would have been on in the States.

Billy: So I looked into this part, Eminem is too old. As we’ve established, he was born in 1972.

John: But, okay. Have you looked into— Detroit is right on the border of Canada.

Billy: Like if they were— oh. Like if they could get it over the air?

Adrianne: Was Disney ever over the air?

Billy: No, but it was on CBC.

Adrianne: Oh yeah! Wait, that’s a kind of a theory.

John: I think he might’ve gotten Under the Umbrella Tree over the air in Detroit.

Billy: It’s possible and could have been, you know, it started in 1986, so yeah, he could have just had it on as a teenager or again, yeah, he could have seen it like with his kids around or his friend’s kids or something. 

Adrianne: Can we just like, the absurdity of this is that Eminem is renowned for his ability to rhyme stuff. And I feel like we’re going through lots of acrobatics here trying to figure out how he could have possibly thought of door hinge versus orange on his own?

Billy: Yeah, exactly.

Adrianne: But anyway, I’m enjoying this game. Let’s continue.

Billy: So, yeah, I agree. I don’t know if it would be fair to say Eminem stole this from Bob, especially because Bob isn’t even sure he can take credit for it.

Bob: That’s just the kind of thing that I would read aligned somewhere orange and door hinge rhyme and I could actually build a script around it. You know, I just don’t have the confidence to say that my little brain was the one that came up with that originally. So I would even say— say, I’m say 60-40 that I probably read it somewhere else.

Billy: Okay.

Bob: You gotta keep doing your research. 

Billy: Yeah, I gotta keep digging in.

Bob: But I certainly do feel that I had it before than Eminem did.

Billy: Yeah. That’s what’s important, I think.

Bob: Yeah. He’s getting all those royalties. They should be coming my way.

Billy: Right. 

So, I don’t think I have the power or the justification to get Bob royalties from Eminem, but he raises an interesting point: who really did come up with this first? Does it predate Bob? And I was able to find, I think, the perfect person for unpacking that question.

Grant: I’m Grant Barrett. I was an editor of dictionaries for a long time. I made dictionaries about slang and new words. I worked for Oxford University Press and Cambridge University Press, and some other dictionary makers. I’ve been involved with the American dialect society for 20 or more years. This is an academic society about language spoken in North America.

Billy: Grant currently co-hosts A Way With Words, which is a radio show that’s syndicated across North America.

Grant: On the radio show, we talk about old sayings and expressions. We often do word history as we can try to get to the bottom of where things come from and how they got here, the kind of the linguistic heirlooms. 

The things that get passed from generation to generation until one day you say, “wait a second, is that true? Or why did we say that? Or that doesn’t make any sense? Why is that in our speech?” And so we’re trying to help people sort that out and puzzle through that.

Billy: I had emailed Grant and I told him about my journey so far. And my point with all of this setup about him is just to highlight that Grant is extremely qualified to talk about language and I, on the other hand, am not. 

So I’ve been calling this a lexiconic meme. Is that an appropriate way of describing it? What would you call it? 

Grant: Well lexiconic isn’t a word, I guess it is now that you’ve coined it, but, maybe a lexical meme or a lexicographic meme.

Billy: Okay.

Grant: I almost sent you an image that I sometimes post to social media, which is a big, bright letters over a previous meme that used to make the rounds where people, you know, bad etymology or it says, “don’t get your etymologies from memes.” 

But my second question that I asked in my head, which I often do of our listeners is, why? What are we getting at here? What are we achieving? Why is this the thing? Why is this the burr under your saddle? Tell me, lie back on the couch and close your eyes and tell me.

Billy: Well, oh man, we might be here a while. I think, personally, I just can’t let things go when I encounter something and I know that it’s not right.

Grant: Oh, yeah. It’s the old there. Somebody wrong on the internet thing, right?

Billy: Yeah.

Grant: I have a bad case of that too. 

The bottom of this is we’re still talking about words that rhyme with orange. The idea that there are no rhymes for orange goes back maybe at least 200 years, maybe longer. There was a bit of doggerel making the rounds in 1862 in English newspapers. And it’s talking about rhymes for the word orange and the word month, which is another one of those. 

Month, orange and silver are three words that often just have to have no rhymes. And according to this, it says one corresponded to a young lady, perhaps suggest—  and this is how it’s written. I’m going to pronounce it as it’s written, “the man muth be a thilly thuth who cannot find a rhyme to mouth and any lady hath marath could kith or tath or rhyme to oranth.” 

Billy: I’m really impressed. I’m really impressed with your rendition of that. 

Grant: Anyway, she’s intentionally misspelled these words so you sound like you’re talking with a list, but in order to rhyme words, and there’s another one here, “let memory through the chronicles of war range, ascending times, great stream that swiftly runneth let us recall how William Prince of orange resisted Louis Minio where a month.

So runneth and month and war range and orange. My favorite rhyme of all is the one that Willard Espy did. Do you know that one?

Billy: I don’t believe so. No.

Grant: It’s a four line little bit, and it goes like this, 

four engin- 

eers

wear orange 

brassieres

that’s it. 

Billy: Wow. 

Grant: And he breaks up the word engineers onto two lines. So you get four engin on one line, four engin- 

eers

wear orange 

brassieres

Billy: Oh, wow. Yeah. Very effective too. Yeah.

Adrianne:  Four engineers wear orange brassieres.

Billy: But we still have not arrived at rhyming orange and door hinge, which was the rhyme that both Eminem and Under the Umbrella Tree use. But, have any of you ever used the website Wordnik?

John: No.

Adrianne: Yeah. Wordnik I think supplies the dictionary definition snippet from DuckDuckGo.

Billy: Oh really?

Regina: Oh really?

Billy: Yeah, well Grant co-founded Wordnik and Wordnik claims to be the world’s biggest online English dictionary by number of words. And one of the cool functions of Wordnik as a website is that any user can create lists of words. And so you find people organizing large numbers of words in really interesting, insightful ways on Wordnik. And there is a list made by user Alec Z titled Orange Poetry. And this contains 120 words and word combinations that supposedly rhyme with orange.

Adrianne: Oh, my god.

Billy: And in the description of the list on Wordnik, it links to a book on Google books and it says that 90 or so of the items on the list come from this book. 

Adrianne: Oh?

Billy: The book is called Uncle, Can You Find A Rhyme For Orange?

Regina: What? 

Adrianne: Oh, my gosh.

Billy: And in it, the writer rhymes orange with door hinge.

Regina: Wait, when is the book from?

Billy: It’s from 1869. 

Adrianne: Woah. 1869? 

Billy: Yes. So I shared this with Grant. He had not seen it, but he immediately filed it away.

Grant:  I downloaded it and added it to my data stash. I have like a couple hundred gigabytes of stuff that I use to research for the show. And I’m like, “Oh, this is a good one. This is great.” Find that anytime this’ll come up in the future, I’ll have that book.

Billy: You think it probably goes back even further than this?

Grant: The hunt for earlier is somewhat of a rabbit hole. So what you’ve done is you’ve staked out some ground that somebody will have to beat, but you’ve confirmed that this is a long-standing hunt and it predates all modern attempts to rhyme orange with anything. 

So, you’ve beat the TV show. You’ve beat Eminem, you’ve beat all the modern little word game writers. You’d probably beat all the limericks I found that jokingly rhyme door hinge with orange.

Billy: Hmm, what era would you place most of those?

Grant: Those in the 1900s.

Billy: So between this book and some of the earlier examples Grant cited, it seems that sometime in the 1860s, there was a notably heightened interest in rhyming with the word orange.

Grant: We’re looking at the 1860s decades as when this kind of popped out.

Billy: If this issue that I found, this issue with Google giving Eminem credit for rhyming orange with door hinge, if that’s just a reflection of our collective knowledge, Google taking the answer from what it knows on the internet, that leaves an important final question, why? Why does Eminem get credit for rhyming orange with door hinge?

Grant: In the world of people who gather quotations, famous things that are said, they talk about how quotations, no matter who they’re said by, they tend to gravitate to being attributed to even more famous people. 

So if they were said by a nondescript scientist that you’ve never heard of, eventually somebody will say that they were said by Albert Einstein. And then that’s the one that sticks. Or if they were said by a politician that you don’t really know somehow, eventually they’re either set by JFK or Abraham Lincoln. Or if it was a writer that most people don’t know somehow, eventually it’s Shakespeare or Mark Twain. And I think that’s what’s happening here.

Billy: A reasonable conclusion here would be that as AI often does, Google’s algorithm is just reflecting a known human bias that common sayings are often credited to the most famous person who could have possibly said them. 

And that definitely seems to be true here. For example, if you Google Merriam Webster rhymes for orange, you’ll get an entry on Merriam Webster’s official website that cites both Eminem and Elon Musk as having rhymed orange with door hinge.

Adrianne: I’m sorry, Elon Musk?

Billy: Yes. Somebody said on Twitter that there’s no rhyme for orange and Elon responded with a tweet saying “door hinge.” 

And Merriam Webster isn’t claiming that either Elon or Eminem were the first to have rhymed orange with door hinge, but here just sort of by default, Eminem, who is the best-selling rapper of all time by most metrics and Elon Musk who fluctuates in and out of being literally the richest person on the planet, the two of them are sharing joint credit.

Grant: You know what Gresham’s law is? In money, there’s the tendency for bad money to drive out good, which is if you have two coins and one is made out of actual silver, and one is made out of fake silver, the actual silver will eventually be melted down and turned into something else. And the fake silver will be the coin that actually ends up circulating. And that’s kind of what happens with bad etymologies and false attributions for quotes. 

The false attribution and the bad etymologies will be the one that circulates cause the real ones usually aren’t as much fun. They usually don’t have the famous name attached.

Billy: So here’s my contribution to the Google hive mind, the oldest example I can find of someone rhyming orange with door hinge comes from the 1869 book Uncle, Can You Find A Rhyme For Orange? And rather than performing that passage from the book myself, I thought it would be nice to end with a reading by a character from what will always be the origin of this rhyme in my heart.

Billy: Hello?

Gloria: Hello?

Billy: Is this Gloria?

Gloria: Yes, it is. Hi, Gloria the gopher that’s me. Yep.

Billy: Wow. I sent you an excerpt from a book. 

Gloria: Right. 

Billy: Did you get it?

Gloria: Yep. I did on my computer, on my email. Thank you.

Billy: Would you mind reading it for us?

Gloria: Sure. Okay. Here goes, “Cut short the word and off he strode to where a creaking door hinge told of a place where he might gaze on every kind of orange.” How was that?

Billy: That was excellent, Gloria.

Gloria: Good. Thank you.

Billy: Have you been practicing?

Gloria: I read it a few times. Yeah, yeah.

Billy: Wow, that was very good. Thank you.

Gloria: Oh, I can read, you know.

Billy: I know.

Gloria: Okay. Bye. Bye Billy.

Billy: Bye.

Adrianne: Yeah.

Billy: That was Gloria the gopher played by the creator of Under the Umbrella Tree, Noreen Young.

Regina: Underunderstood is Billy Disney, Adrianne Jeffries, John Largomarsino and me, Regina Dellea.

Billy: A big thank you to Noreen Young for her help with this episode, she could not have been more generous with her time. I had an extended conversation with her. She was super helpful. And, you know, they say don’t meet your idols, but I clarify that the exception to that rule should be Canadian puppeteers.

Adrianne: If you liked the show, please tell a friend, someone you think would like it.

John: And if you’d like to support the show directly, we have a Patreon you can sign up for. $5 a month gets you access to our bonus podcast Overunderstood and, really delightful Discord server where people who listened to the show hang out and talk to us and each other. That’s how communication works on the internet.

Billy: It’s great. Discord is our Umbrella Tree. We all hang out under it.

Regina: Thanks for listening!