"Very" and "hairy" only rhyme if you're from the Midwest or California. In the Northeast (and in much of the UK) they're pronounced completely differently.
Agreed - they don't rhyme in the UK, so maybe another clue would better? Here 'very' rhymes with 'berry' or 'cherry' and 'hairy' rhymes with 'Fairy' or 'Mary'.
I'm mostly with dasubergeek. In the part of the Northeast I'm from (central Jersey), "very" generally has a short "e" sound, while "hairy" has a long "a" sound. There are admittedly many people around there who do pronounce both with a long "a," though.
And lemme tell ya, my last name is Vary with a long "a", so ever since elementary school I have been made excruciatingly familiar with this extremely specific matter of rhyming and pronunciation.
I think in much of the world "very" and "vary" are pronounced identically. Western Canada does not usually distinguish between the pronunciation of the two.
Do "Tamil" and "camel" really rhyme? I've always been pronouncing "i" in "Tamil" as "i" in "mill" or "family" and "e" in "camel" as "e" in "gravel" or "barrel". That's maybe because I'm non-native English speaker, but I'm pretty sure I've heard native English speakers pronouncing the same way as I did.
Hate to be picky, but the clue should probably be changed to "A player of a low-note instrument who has a problem with people of a different color." Racism isn't a one-way street.
Really fun quiz. The ointment one stumped me for a while. I always thought of ointment as a salve rather than a lotion, but I eventually figured it out. When I looked it up both are given as synonyms.
So at first I missed the part where each word is 2 syllables. And while I eventually got "Silly filly," my first thought for some reason was "LOL foal."
Very - Hairy? They just don't rhyme in my part of the world. Perhaps "Scary/Hairy" ("its scary that something is that hairy") is a much closer answer for that rhyme and meaning combination?
Otherwise a great quiz
The vowel sound in "hairy" is NOT pronounce like a short e, but as the combination of ai. (air, care, stair, pair) Phonetically, it would be HARE-ee.
The vowel sounds in "deck" and "care" are not the same. Neither are the vowel sounds in "very" and "hairy".
And lemme tell ya, my last name is Vary with a long "a", so ever since elementary school I have been made excruciatingly familiar with this extremely specific matter of rhyming and pronunciation.
Tamil is pronounced more as TAM - eel (as in the fish)
While camel is CaM - ill.
They don't rhyme
but that didn't stop me from trying 'truffle shuffle'