Today as we were driving somewhere the song “Cat’s In The Cradle” came on the radio. Now, I already got my fill of early 1970s folk music quite some time back, namely in the early 1970s. But the first two lines of this song’s chorus have always rubbed me the wrong way for an additional reason:
(Italics mine.)
To me this passage has always suggested that as early 1974, popular culture was already conflating the recent historical events concerning men on the moon with the old myths of a man in the moon. I’m not saying Chapin didn’t know the difference, but it appears that he couldn’t be bothered to write it down that way. At times, in retrospect, this lyric even seemed to be an early hint of the meh future of space exploration which we now know to have come true. There would be no more of these soul-stirring crewed expeditions to other worlds.
This time today, however, I thought of another possibility: perhaps some English speakers, whether idiosyncratically by themselves or as as part of dialect populations, have always said “man on the moon” to mean the old fable. Are there any populations that do this? I’ve never heard it myself, though.
The OED in a long list of cites from 1325 onwards has not a single instance of the variant the man on the moon. I’d say this is simply a case of ignorance at work.
OF course Elizabeth may be making or repeating a mistake her way, its more plausible that a man IN the moon controls the moon… to personify the moon and make the moon a steerable thing… a man merely ON the moon is more of a passenger on the rock that goes around in a boring orbit.
There is a pub near me called “The Man On The Moon”. Many people substitute ‘in’ for ‘on’ thinking of the nursery rhyme, but in fact the pub was named in 1969 to celebrate Armstrong, Collins and Aldrin’s achievement.
I listened to the song on YouTube and that syllable could have gone either way. You would hear “on” if you wanted to, but “in” if that’s what you were expecting.
Just as a side note: the poem was written by Harry’s wife Sandy, and he put it to music. Maybe we should ask her what she meant.
A German version of the tale has it that the man was banished to the Moon for gathering firewood, i.e. working, on the Sabbath. On the way home, with his bundle of wood slung diagonally across his back, he meets a stranger “in a Sunday suit” to whom he mocks the Sabbath. The stranger seems to have some power to mete out divine retributions, so he responds by saying “now all your days shall be Mo(o)nday”, and condemns the man to reside in the Moon forever, as a warning to all Sabbath breakers. The Monday/Moonday pun works in most Romance and Germanic languages reasonably well, given that the word for Monday is usually based on some variant of “Luna” or “Moon”.
Accordingly, in the tradition based on this story, some people prefer to imagine the full figure of the man standing, with his wood still bundled behind his back, as shown here. But even given this version of the story, it doesn’t seem like the man could be on the moon, given that the moon usually seems to be a mere flat disk pasted to the sky’ and it’s hard to see how uneducated peasants would conceive of it as a place on which you can stand and walk around.
Speaking for myself, the “face” has always been obvious as far back as I can remember, and seems perfectly calculated to convey the idea of slack-jawed ignorance and credulity.
Yeah, I’ve always heard it and sang it as “man in the moon,” myself. Listening to it again, I guess I could see how you can hear it as “man on the moon,” but I hear it as “man in the moon.”
Interesting. I’ve always heard it as “on”, without question, and Johnny grew up in Southern California same as I did.
It could be that the singer’s pronunciation differs slightly in the successive chorus repeats, and each of us has unintentionally focused on a particular repeat as Chapin’s definitive pronunciation.
