allthingslinguistic:

xkcd: Wikipedia article titles with the right syllable stress pattern to be sung to the tune of the original Teenage Mutant Ninja Turtles theme song. (Here’s the song, for reference.)

All of these titles are examples of trochaic tetrameter, which is one of the most common English meters (a trochee is a foot consisting of STRONG-weak and tetrameter is four feet per line). Another example is Twinkle Twinkle Little Star, although that has a deficient last foot, but you can sing any of these titles to that tune as well if you just double the last note.

Trochaic tetrameter creates a strong feeling of sing-song “poem-ness” in English. Most Shakespearean characters, for example, speak in iambic pentameter (weak-STRONG, five feet per line), which sounds more natural, but a few speak in trochaic tetrameter for dramatic effect. For example, MacBeth and Lady MacBeth speak in iambic pentameter, which gives the effect of talking normally: 

Methought I heard a voice cry “Sleep no more!
Macbeth does murder sleep,” the innocent sleep,
Sleep that knits up the ravell’d sleave of care,

Out, damned spot! out, I say!—One: two: why,
then, ‘tis time to do’t.—Hell is murky!—Fie, my
lord, fie! a soldier, and afeard? What need we
fear who knows it, when none can call our power
to account?—Yet who would have thought the old
man to have had so much blood in him?

But the witches speak in trochaic tetrameter, which makes them seem like they’re delivering an incantation: 

Double, double toil and trouble;
Fire burn, and cauldron bubble.

Fair is foul, and foul is fair

Previous xkcd on poetry: metrical foot fetish, ballad meter, trochaic fixation. Language Log also has a long, interesting post on meter.