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Anybody check to see if the beacon on the old Hancock Building was flashing red last night?

Old Hancock Building flashing lights: Steady blue, clear view, flashing blue, cloudy

The Boston Architectural College posted a copy of a 1950 postcard showing what the lights atop the old Hancock Building mean, in the days when a) the building wasn't "old" (since there was no "new" Hancock) and b) they had yet to come up with the mnemonic rhyme nobody can remember.

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Can mean "5G interference"! Pilots beware!

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Gee, thanks Adam.

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(clears throat)

Steady blue, skies of blue
Flashing blue, clouds are due
Steady red, rain ahead
Flashing red, snow instead

And there's some other pattern which indicates (indicated?) that the Sox game was cancelled.

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I think the “official” version begins

Steady blue, clear view
Flashing blue, clouds due

I mean, you can’t just rhyme “blue” with “blue”. If you could do that, you could rhyme “orange” with “orange”, and then where would we be?

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...light is blue, skies are too
Flashing blue, clouds are due
Light is red, rain ahead
Flashing red, snow instead

...or the Red Sox have been canceled. Or possibly both at times, given that baseball now starts in early April and goes until November.

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Flashing blue - clouds due. Steady red - rain ahead Flashing red - snow instead (or in summer, Red Sox game cancelled)

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Fun facts:

  • “Orange” rhymes with at least a couple of obscure words: “door hinge”, “Blorenge” (a hill in Wales), and “sporange” (a biological term related to “spores”). There is, of course, much more on this topic.
  • English has lots of common words that really don't rhyme with anything else — quoting Wikipedia again:

    The majority of words with antepenultimate stress, such as ambulance,[18] animal, citizen, dangerous and obvious, and with preantepenultimate stress, such as (un)necessary, logarithm, algorithm and sacrificing, have no rhyme.

    For feminine rhymes, the final two syllables must match to count as a rhyme. Once the stress shifts to the penultimate syllable, rhymeless words are quite common, perhaps even the norm: there may be more rhymeless words than words with rhymes.[36] The following words are representative, but there are thousands of others: angel, angry, anxious, chimney, comment, elbow, empty, engine, foible, foyer, hundred(th), husband, liquid, luggage, monster, nothing, olive, penguin, polka, problem, sanction, sandwich, secret, something, zigzag

Having read that article a few years ago, it’s now weird & amusing to me that “orange” is such a famous example of a rhymeless word, when [a] it does have some rhymes, albeit obscure ones, and [b] there's loads of common words (engine! husband! nothing! problem! sandwich!) that really don't have a rhyme!

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does not rhyme with orange. Try it, and you’ll make anyone cringe. Proper names do not count, as they can be invented at will. Sporange is a contender, although according to the OED it’s stressed on the second syllable.

I actually know a very famous poem with a very nice rhyme on orange. The catch is that it’s in French.

from Au Lecteur, by Charles Baudelaire:

Ainsi qu'un débauché pauvre qui baise et mange

Le sein martyrisé d'une antique catin,

Nous volons au passage un plaisir clandestin

Que nous pressons bien fort comme une vieille orange.

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I’m just parroting Wikipedia here :-)

I assume that article was written or at least edited by someone with an accent where “door hinge” is a close rhyme for “orange”. They sound a little different to my ear, but close enough that I’d be more amused than annoyed if someone tried to pair them as a rhyme in a song lyric, for example.

But I’m more amused by the fact that there seem to be lots of words — sandwich! husband! — that also don’t seem to have a rhyme. Everybody latches onto “orange”, but rhymeless words seem to be way more common than that one example.

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I’m sure there there are people that pronounce it “oringe”, and who drop the h in “hinge”. And it is interesting that there are so many other words without rhymes that don’t get the same credit. One fantasy that jumped into my head - an unlikely one - was that a poet, trying to translate Baudelaire’s poem, got totally frustrated about being unable to find a rhyme for “orange” in that stanza, and bitched about it to his poet-friends; they all tried it too, without success, and a legend was born.

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... I can hear a voice saying "aw-rinj" -- maybe it was an ancient Brooklyn thing (heard from relatives who came from there).

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...means the Red Sox game is rained out. That must have come into play after 1950.

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FLASHING BLUE COWS GO MOO

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does anybody remember the year that, in the middle of the block party after the Gay Pride parade, somebody turned on both the red and blue lights at the same time, meaning the lights were lavender on Pride Day!

people called Hancock to thank them but they said it was an operator error

they missed a chance at community building in that follow up, but it was still a fun moment

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Or we're slowly infiltrating?

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What is known about the old miniature railway for moving mail underneath the Hancock Buildings? Didn't The Curiosity Desk Edgar B. Herwick III take a look at the run of the miniature rails?

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As a Somerville resident up on Central Hill (and a view of the lights as a result), I can attest to using the old Hancock building's weather beacon for a general sense of what the weather's going to be tomorrow. More fun to see the blinking blue lights and say to my wife, "Hey, I guess, clouds due!" than to just look it up in a weather app!

Fun fact: when looking this up on wikipedia, I found there have been at least five buildings in Boston called the John Hancock Building, and yet there are currently no buildings officially called that.

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I had to look it up. I walk past the "current" one all the time and had no idea it's apparently now a former one. Thanks.

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You can find these old postcards at antique shops sometimes. They're nice little memorabilia. The company that made this one also made a lot of other Boston around town illustrations.

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I had the opportunity to work in both Hancock buildings when I worked for Deloitte several years ago. Always felt like a little kid walking into the tower… I still get wide eyes thinking about it today.

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Thank you Adam for your continuing support!

If others are interested in downloading more Boston postcards, we have been uploading them here. https://tinyurl.com/2p8jsr4z

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