My favorite new word: feghoot

Last year I had a blast reading Stephen Fry’s The Ode Less Travelled. Not only did I learn a lot about verse, but I got to encounter all kinds of fantastic poetry vocab, like dithyramb and trochee, to name a few.

Little did I know I had yet to meet another fantastic member of the poetry lingo set: the feghoot.

What, you may ask, is a feghoot?

The feghoot is a coda, a little pun tacked onto the end of narrative verse. It turns out that feghoots have been in my life since early childhood. The ending I learned to “Little Rabbit Foo Foo” is a classic feghoot:

“Hare today, goon tomorrow.”

The hare half of the pun should be obvious even to someone who has never heard of “Little Rabbit Foo Foo.” Here’s a link to the lyrics if you’re curious about the goon.

But before you click, take my advice and watch out for the Good Fairy.