In Meredith Willson’s The Music Man, a number performed originally by the superb barber-shop quartet the Buffalo Bills features the lyrics

You can catch a contemporary split-screen version with the talented Julien Neel singing all four parts simultaneously.

In the meantime, I am interested in the linguistic phenomenon of words contained within other words, e.g. “sin” in “sincere” or “toes” in “tomatoes,” or for that matter “quart” in “quartet” and “bar” in “barber-shop.”   “Fair” inside “farewell,” as in the Music Man song, doesn’t really count, since the spelling of the two words differs.  It’s possible to create whole sentences built around a word-within-a-word: “Watch out! There’s a rat in that crate!”  That “never” encloses “ever” seems trivial, since the two words are obviously related.  That “evil” lurks within “devil” is more intriguing, since the two words, somewhat surprisingly, have wholly distinct origins.  “Devil” comes ultimately from the Greek diabolos, meaning “slanderer”—literally, someone who hurls (Greek ballein) accusations across (Greek dia) the room at you.  “Evil,” meanwhile, according to the OED, derives from purely Germanic terms related to “over,” with the sense “going overboard,” “overstepping limits.”

There is a serious and indeed deeply moving word-within-a-word in a work by the poet William Blake.  A political radical with profound sympathies for the poor and the powerless in late eighteenth-century England, Blake published in one of his illustrated books, Songs of Innocence (1789), the poem “The Chimney Sweeper.”  It begins

When my mother died I was very young,
And my father sold me while yet my tongue
Could scarcely cry ” ‘weep! ‘weep! ‘weep! ‘weep!’ “
So your chimneys I sweep & in soot I sleep.

Here is the poem as originally published by Blake, in a hand-colored plate:

The situation presented by the poem is historically accurate.  Parents did sometimes sell their young children to master chimney sweeps; children were at a premium because the sweepers had to shimmy partway up flues to clean them, and some of the flues were very narrow, as narrow as seven inches square.  Youthful sweepers did sleep “in soot,” meaning both that they went to bed without a chance to wash off the soot clinging to them, and that their sleeping place was often down in the basement, among bags of soot—itself a valuable commodity, used in making India ink.  And sweepers did walk the streets of London seeking business by giving their cry of “Sweep! Sweep!,” except that Blake’s little boy is too young to pronounce the word properly and can only cry “weep! weep!”  This is the morally appropriate comment on his condition, one might say.  That “weep” is contained within “sweep” is purely accidental, the two words deriving from completely unrelated Germanic roots, but the accident permits Blake to make a devastating critique of his society.  London might be swept clean, its houses saved from chimney fires, but at a terrible cost to the weeping sweepers.