I wouldn’t really call that ambiguity, but it is fun: leading people to believe you’re about to say something, but saying something else, as epitomized by the Shaving Cream song of Benny Ball:
“I have a sad story to tell you.
It may hurt your feelings a bit.
last night, when I walked in my bathroom,
I stepped in a pile of…
Shaving cream, be nice and clean!
Shave every day, and you’ll always look keen.”
There’s also Tom Lehrer’s:
“Her breakfast coffee taste like cham--------
poo.”
Ok, I’m stretching there, but it does play on a phrase that could refer to more than one thing until the rest of the lyric “collapses the wave function” so to speak.
Kinda like the joke: What’s furry on the outside and slimy on the inside?
A: Okra
Bippy, if you’re still here, I got a couple of pages with a few classic Shakespeare puns. In the first one, check the link to “endangered puns” – i.e., those which we don’t “get” anymore b/c pronunciations have changed. (Btw, one of the reasons I disliked academia was the tendency to have students rush into writing papers on topics like Shakespeare’s portrayal of women, for instance, without getting into all the fun stuff… or even insisting that they learn what all the words meant!)
Some Beatles song, I think: “I will love you more than her.”
Grammar Nazis love lines like that. “More than SHE, more than SHE!”
The entire scene in Fiddler on the Roof when [spoiler]Tevye thinks they’re talking about his cow, and Lazar thinks they’re talking about Tevye’s daughter. The audience is completely in on it. From memory:
T: How much do you want for the old cow?
L: Don’t call her an old cow!
T: Well, that’s what she is![/spoiler]
The line, from “If I Fell”, is “that you would love me more than her”. And you’re right, taken in a strict sense, it implies “that you would love me more than you would love her”. Pretty racy for 1964!
“I will love you more than she” is grammatically incorrect, especially in the sense used by The Beatles (“I will love you more than (I love) her.” It’s an ambiguous line, yes, but it’s sound grammar. “I will love you more than she” sounds like you’re setting up “I will love you more than she (loves you),” anyway.
One of my favorites has always been from Elvis Costello’s New Lace Sleeves about rich socialites:
Oh I know they’ve got their problems
I wish I was one of them
AC/DC’s Jailbreak:
Seen his woman being fooled with
By another man
She was down, he was up
He had a gun in his hand
It never struck me, but I had a friend in highschool that insisted Tori Amos was, in the song Winter, implying that she had been jilted when she sings the line:
He believed the lyric “Withering” was intended to be heard ambiguously as both “Withering” AND as “With a ring”.
I don’t know if that was her intention but I rather like the interpretation.
Another Elvis Costello example (one of my favs!):
From This Town:
“Knows your poison”
as in knowing your choice of liqour (as in “what’s your poison?”) / also in the broader sense of knowing your personal vice.
To be heard also as
“Knows you’re poison”
as in knowing that you are poison, that you’re no good, that you’re trouble.
My interpretation but I am certain it is intended!
And the song continues:
Got your number
Knows it must be avoided
Which is the same thing.
Later, on the same album (Spike) there is Let Him Dangle, which is about a (real) hanging that turned on an extremely questionable interpretation of an ambiguous statement, viz “Let him have it, Chris”.
i don’t know the title of this song ,but it plays on the local “alterantive” rock station quite frequently. the chorus goes:
“you make me come, yeah, yeah”
“you make me complete, yeah, yeah”
“youe make me completely miserable.”
so while the first two refrains sound like she is great in bed and the love of his life it turns out he really hates her.
That’s be “miserable” by Lit - who knew they were still around?