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Excellent questions, Боб! In my "mnemonic", I took some liberties with the rhymes/pronunciations for exactly the reason you guessed: because the [ɛ] doesn't occur as the final syllable of any English...

Here's a mnemonic rhyme that I made up a couple years ago to help people understand the basic functions of noun cases, and also to learn the case-endings for "Type 1" feminine nouns, using девушка...