Go to the Argentinian, Puerto Rican, Chilean, and some Mexican and Colombian pronunciations here. You’ll here both “zhama” and “jama”:
That’s what I came in here to say.
Huh. How do you pronounce “Mexico”?
Yeah, it doesn’t come up that often, but usually “MEH-hee-co.”
And “Paris”?
Paris. Like the Greek guy.
I feel like “Texas” is too important to the verse to drop it, but there just aren’t any good word choices that fit the theme and rhyme with it any better than “taxes” does.
Vexes? Nexus? Alexis? Solar plexus? Lexus?
Maybe that last one could work.
Billy Mack is a detective down in Texas
The taxpayers put the gas in his Lexus
Hmm. Still feels clunky. Also, the Lexus hadn’t yet hit the market when the song was written, so we’d have to invoke some sort of time travel to get Steve Miller to write that line.
Linda Ronstadt’s “You and I march to the beat of a different drum” drives me nuts, although I’m not sure how to fix it.
If you parse it as written, it means that you and I are marching to the beat of the same drum, which is different from the one the majority is following.
What she wants to say is that you and I are marching to the beats of two different drums (different from each other, if that isn’t clear), which is what the lyrics that follow say.
Can’t figure out a way to phrase it that makes good lyrics, though.
Give the difference in IPA, then.
…To go to work, he rode Tyrannosaurus Rexes
I think the chorus to I Am the Walrus should be changed to:
I am the wordman, they aren’t the wordmen
I’m a thesaurus, shoo-bee-doo-bee-doo
Well, this raises an interesting question. Is the act of “be good” a state of being? In which case the opposite would be “isn’t”. Or is it something you “do”? In which case the oppose would be “doesn’t”.
“Be good” is a form of the verb to be. No argument there, right? The formation of its contradiction needs some verb to be, with a “not” tacked on.
“He better be good to you…”
“And if he isn’t [good to you]…”
“Doesn’t” in this sentence is an abomination that cries out to God for vengeance. Come on, people, this is important!
In Pat Traver’s I La La La Love You, the first lines are:
“When I tell you that I love you baby
Don’t you that I like it from the bottom of my heart
Uh huh, uh huh”
Wouldn’t it make more sense if it were, “I mean it from the bottom of my heart”?
With Linda’s phrasing, it could easily be “…travel to the beat of different drums.” Sure, it messes up the “run” rhyme in the next line, but not much.
In any case, blame Mike Nesmith. He wrote it.
Yeah, I can’t see any parsing where “doesn’t” is acceptable there. And I don’t mean in the prescriptivist “don’t use no double negatives in English” manner, I mean in a descriptivist manner – I wouldn’t have thought any native speaker would consider that a proper construction in their dialect. Then again, maybe it is a feature of MJ’s dialect – it wouldn’t be the first time I learned something new. But now that I think about it, maybe it is? I mean, if it were “he better treat you well/'cause if he doesn’t”, that is a normal construction. Maybe there is a dialectal variation where “be” verbs can take “does/doesn’t.” I don’t know. But for my dialect, that’s definitely not a valid construction.
I know he’d better be good to you
'Cause if he doesn’t [be good to you],
I’ll be there.
He is the someone new, but that’s not what I was disputing.
I don’t know how you can interpret it any other way.
Huh?
I don’t see what beer has to do with anything.
I always assumed Mellencamp did that deliberately.
“Doesn’t be good to you” seems a proper use of the King’s English, eh? Okey-dokey…