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Fitterel

Constraint
Pronunciation

Understanding ARPABET Pronunciation

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The pronunciation guide uses the ARPABET phonetic system—the same system used in speech recognition and text-to-speech applications.

Vowel Examples:
AE1 = cat, bat
EH1 = bed, head
IY1 = see, me
OW1 = go, boat
UW1 = boot, do
Stress Numbers:
0 = no stress (unstressed)
1 = primary stress (loud)
2 = secondary stress (medium)
Example:
AH0 TH IY1 N AH0
= a-THEE-na (Athena)

The stressed syllable (marked with 1) is pronounced louder and clearer than others.

Quick Definition

A poem filled with ornamental but meaningless flourishes or decorative excess.

Detailed Definition
Fitterel mandates superfluous embellishment—archaic diction, redundant adjectives, or syntactic curlicues—as stylistic rule; this constraint parodies ornate rhetoric or decadent aesthetics, using “empty” decoration to critique pretension or explore beauty as surface, and demonstrates how constraint can valorize the gratuitous through disciplined extravagance.
Example
Example in poetry:
Fitterel (ornamental nonsense): Elizabethan fitterel in courtly verse (“tra-la-la” refrains); nursery rhymes with decorative syllables; constraint poets use fitterel as metrical filler; fitterel in song lyrics adapted to page poetry; modern fitterel mimicking digital noise (“error 404”); Oulipo’s “fitterel constraint” requiring one nonsense word per line.
Additional Notes
Fitterel is ornamental nonsense—decorative syllables (“tra-la-la”). Students use it for musicality or parody. It appears in nursery rhymes and courtly verse, linking to sound poetry.
Also Known As
Fribble ornamental nonsense
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