Rhyme is a parity bit

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Weird thought of the day.

Speech patterns that rhyme are pleasing and resonate with our brain.

Could there be an evolutionary benefit to it?


Cultures without writing systems told stories to pass knowledge from one generation to the next.

As we know from the Chinese whispers game, a lot of information is lost that way.

During oral story telling, information is added, removed or changed, it is wildly unreliable.


In computer systems we add checksums or parity bits to lossy mediums to ensure reliable transmission.

In way, the constraint of rhyming words can be seen as a parity bit on sentences.

The amount of words that can be placed in a rhyming sentence is significantly lower than in an unconstrained one.


Perhaps humans got better at reliable data transmission when they evolved to appreciate rhyme.

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