Professor Higgin’s first song at the beginning of the film version of My Fair Lady is “Why Can’t The English Teach Their Children How To Speak?”, in which Higgins rants about the low quality of English spoken by the working classes in his country- At some stage, there are the following lines:
After this to, there is a little pause in which Higgins is noticeably unsure what to say, then continues with “…set a good example to people whose English is painful to your ears”. My impression is that the intended joke here is that Higgins was, at first, inclined to say something else (which ought to rhyme with “get”), but then thinks he’d rather avoid that (because it contradicts something he had said himself?) and continues with the words above. Furthermore, I guess the composer of the song thought it would be perfectly obvious to the listener what this initial thought was - otherwise the joke wouldn’t work. Yet, I can’t think of what the joke here was. Does anyone here have any ideas?
“Get” rhymes with “set,” and if he had stopped at that point it would have rhymed & scanned and made less sense than the rest of the song does, so he just keeps going… trying to parse any of that man’s singing is an exercise in madness.
Yeah, I think the joke is just that the line goes on longer than it “should”, continuing well past the word that rhymes with the previous line. If we imagine that Higgins was really making the song up on the spot, he realized too late that he couldn’t get a meaningful line with the same meter and rhyme scheme but plowed ahead anyway.
Minor threadjack, but I also think it’s funny in that song that he makes a point of saying that “By right they ought to be taken out and hung, for the cold-blooded murder of the English tongue.”
He’s grammatically incorrect there, the common mistake on hanged vs. hung.
Sure, it’s poetic license. But it’s dodgy to claim poetic license in something about language abuse
OK, it seems I was overinterpreting here. I had noticed, of course, that “set” in these lines rhymes with “get”, and that this is an instance where the verse continues well after the word that forms the rhyme (something which is very common in the lyrics to My Fair Lady). I thought, however, that there would be another rhyme with “get” which the “set” replaced, but apparently that’s reading too much into it. In any case, thanks for the input!
Pauses like that are also used to let the audience fill up their own version, usually what the audience would come up with will be dirtier than the official lyrics. It’s not something you hear a lot in current music, but it was a common humoristic resource in the period in which My Fair Lady is set. Often you’d get songs like that in “slumming” settings, with gentlemen (never ladies, of course) such as Higgins and the Colonel watching performances by female singers from lower social strata.
To get technical, the poetic technique here is called enjambment. As wikipedia explains, it occurs when “the meaning runs over from one poetic line to the next without terminal punctuation.” That’s what is going on here, and it’s a fairly common poetic practice.
There isn’t really that much of a pause before the word “set,” at least not as the song is written. I just looked at the sheet music. There is a quarter rest after “English,” a quarter rest after “learn,” and a quarter rest after “to,” and no indication that the tempo is meant to change. In other words, the “pause” before the word “set” is exactly as long as the pauses that occur between each word of the phrase “English learn to…” Basically Loewe is using the rests to slow down that entire line, before plunging ahead into “Set a good example…” which has no rests and thus is perceived as moving faster. Meanwhile Lerner is emphasizing Higgins’s passion for his subject by having him scurry on to his next thought right away, cleverly using the word “set” as both the concluding rhyme for the previous couplet, and the initial word of the next one.
It says hung isn’t necessarily wrong, just less customary… and then that it’s becoming more common. My sense means that it’s still probably not right, and was if anything likely less right 100 years ago.
It’s English, you can always fit that one word everywhere, and it would fit nicely with the pause:
why can’t the English learn to… fucking! speak!
But the joke, as in many songs that use the technique, is in making the pause and then saying something perfectly clean. There doesn’t need to be something dirty that actually fits, the joke is in getting the public to start searching for something.
As I mentioned in post #17, the pause is not that great, and not only before set. There is a pause (rest) of the same length after “English” and after “learn” as well as after “to.” It’s not an exaggerated pause just before the rhyming word “set,” as though inviting us to anticipate something else.
In other words, the line is not:
Why can’t the English learn to…set a good example, etc.
But rather:
Why can’t the English…learn…to…set a good example, etc.
Musically, Loewe is not setting up some unexpected word choice, so much as he is simply slowing down the tempo of the song by inserting rests between each word. It’s the end of the verse, so it’s a common place to slow things down, as we build to a cadence. Lerner’s lyrics contrast with this by beginning the bridge even as the verse concludes, indicating Higgins’s eagerness to continue making his point. To the extent that there is a joke here, it’s a musical one of having the lyrics continue when the music makes it feel like it should be coming to a stop.
