You left out the best part!
“…have you ever really[sup]3[/sup] ever loved a woman?”
Sublime in its palindromic excess.
With respect to the Dixie Chicks song, I’m no farmer, but if my tobacco was burly, I’d expect it was diseased. Maybe that’s why it’s gone now.
Damn straight. My mom owned a Skylark. I loved that car becuase you never had to dig it out of the snow. Just gun it and the V6 would plow Everest out of your way.
Of course, I never told Mom about my time-saving strategies.
Google is inconclusive - the grammatically-better version seems to have been posted by a fan, suggesting a retro-fit; and even the best out there doesn’t come up to the standards of the second alternative posted above, which would make sense if the next line were "Say ‘Live and let die’ " instead of (what it has always sounded like) “So live and let die”.
I suspect there is a “Kessel Run in less than twenty parsecs!” thing going on here; I’m old enough to remember L&LD when it first came out and the generally-held view was that the lyrics actually went:
in which, of course, the two bolded “in” s were wholly superfluous.
“What I Got” by Sublime. I guess you weren’t a teenager in the second half of the 90s. And honestly, I’ve never really noticed.
Yes, a toad. It’s known as a “similie.” :rolleyes:
A pretty good one, too. Very evocative and if it bothers the literal-minded, that’s their problem.
Another line that’s evocative, not literal. To argue the literal meaning of it is to miss the point entirely. Is it wrong to be poetic? If so, you must really detest John Lennon, who often used words simply because of the way they sounded.
Not exactly what the OP asks, but Jackson Browne rhyming pretender with “ice cream vendor” always struck me as lazy- I have never in my life heard this person called anything but ice cream man. There are plenty of other rhyming words he could have used to avoid this travesty (splendor, blender, fender, lender, et. al.)- still a pretty good song though. “what are you doing outside son?” “waiting for the ice cream vendor, mom” yea right.
**RealityChuck ** , since you referenced The Doors, a bit off the OP, but do you have a take on Jim intoning in some song, for no apparent reason, “I see the bathroom is clear”? I never got what was up with that one.
Municipality
Of
New
York
Is what I believe it stands for.
Re the Doors “Riders on the Storm”, I kind of dig the squirming like a toad line, but the way “a” is pronounced / accented in the line “take a long holiday” grates mightily on my nerves. There are lots of songs in which this happens, though I can’t think of an example at the moment, and it just comes across as lazy writing.
I have nothing against lyrics that are evocative rather than literal – with the posible exception of Neil Diamond’s famous specification that the chair also didn’t answer him, of course. But I don’t get that Joel is going for that in this song.
Consider what he uses for every other rhyme in that vein:
And she only reveals what she wants you to see.
And she’ll take what you give her as long as it’s free.
But she’ll bring out the best and the worst you can be.
Evocative, sure, but literal.
Now, he can do straight-up literal just fine; she’s frequently kind and she’s suddenly cruel, she’ll ruin your faith with her casual lies, she hides like a child, and so on. And he can do evocative with a point just fine too; I don’t object to him saying the most she will do is throw shadows at you, because I get it. But I don’t get how “she can’t be convicted, she’s earned her degree” makes the same kind of sense. Even evocatively.
(Meh. How about I pit it for rhyming “Eden” with “Bleedin”?)
One of my cousins (about 15-20 years older than me) married a girl named ‘Mony’. Not unsurprisingly she loves-hates that song.
Please. The only ambiguity in this line is: Does he really say “in which we’re livin’,” or is it the redundant “in which we live in”? The “if” and “say” are obvious. Even if Paulie doesn’t enunciated them clearly enough, they should be self-evident from the parallel construction. “You used to say ‘live and let live’…” but if this big mean ol’ world is too hurty for you then “say ‘Live and Let Die!’”
There’s a lot to make fun of about this song, beginning with that ludicrous interjection of “Ya know ya did, ya know ya did, ya know ya di-id,” chanted like a schoolyard taunt, but people just go overboard on that one line.
So clearly Nicks just wants us to see how a long-dead Welsh witch is like a sensible Americn-made sedan. Makes perfect sense to me.
RealityChuck, I don’t think Billy Joel’s line is a good example of figurative language. I think it’s a good example of a nonsense put into a song to complete the meter and rhyme. “Squirming like a toad” gives the listener a very uncomfortable visual image and communicates the idea perfectly. But “She can’t be convicted; she’s earned her degree” just makes no sense. There is no figurative connection there. I could offer some possible alterations:
**She can’t be convicted; she wiped her PC
She can’t be convicted; she’s like Syngmon Rhee
She can’t be convicted; not in Tennessee
Alternatively:
She can’t be evicted; she still has the key
She can’t be redacted; she’s like a decree
She can’t be afflicted with AIDS and Hep B.**
No, I think what he’s saying is “I can’t hold anything against her because, to me, she has attained such an elevated status.” See? I can’t convict her because she is babelicious.
Well, that’s my take anyway…
Don’t “please” me, biffo. People have been hearing “in”, “in” and “in” since the firkin thing first came out, and commenting on it. As to “if” and “say”, they may be self-evidently necessary that way in order for the durn thing to make sense, but that’s not evidence that they were written that way… like the parsecs thing.
No, it stands for Mutual of New York, an insurance company whose sign he saw from a hotel window.
And then there’s the classic “A Horse with No Name” by America :
'Cause there ain’t no one for to give you no pain.
“Ain’t” is fine. “Give you no pain,” sure, I’ve heard “no” replaced with “any” plenty of times in the South. But I have never, ever heard a conversation where someone used the double prepositions “for to.”
I’m going to have to say pretty much every rap song made in the last 10 years. Do they even listen to the music they’re recording the lyrics over? Jesus, it’s like the lyric to music equivalent of bashing a square peg into a round hole.
There could be an entire thread for Yesisms. Yes doesn’t so much have lyrics, as word fitted to music.
Actually, I’d say it is. Paulie may write some silly lyrics–including this one–but he’s not stupid, and it’s hardly a stretch to give him the credit for knowing how to complete a coherent sentence (whether grammatical or not). On the other hand, the fact that people have been hearing it wrong all these years only proves that they’ve been spending too much time in that bathroom on the right, waiting to kiss this guy.
No offense meant with the “please.”