In Germany, Mony is a common short-form of Monika (which in German is
pronounced mo-nee-kah).
They might spell it Moni though.
It was my cousin’s name (RIP); she was a sweetheart who died way too young (at age 20).
Of course they do, when she sings them. Your pronunciation is not superior to hers.
Standard pronunciation is superior. Nobody goes to a speech therapy to learn how to speak so “caint” and “paint” will rhyme.
Of course that would be “go to speech therapy”. Perhaps I should go to typing therapy.
I’m not aware of anyone who goes to speech therapy to lose a Southern accent. The kid’s parents should be screaming holy hell if that is the case. People try to lose their accent to avoid being thought of as stupid, but that’s only because ignorant people think southerners are stupid.
This makes sense, at least to me. The first “on” represents the fact that he leaves his lights on all the time.
While I have no problem with their use of “surely” as used in the two songs above, Steely Dan’s music often contains feats of rhetorical legerdemain. My favorite is this line from from Do It Again:
“Now you swear 'n kick’n beg us (pronounced ‘baig’ us)
that you’re not a gambling man,
then you find you’re back in Vegas
with a handle in your hand.”
As for Rhiannon, the “fine skylark” reference never bothered me because of the earlier reference that “she rules her life like a bird in flight”; the thing that has always bugged the crap out of me about this song though, is that the thought expressed in the next line – “and when the sky is starless…” – is never followed up on. It just lies there like a dead fish while the chorus returns to end the song, as shown by this from fleetwoodmac.net:
*"She is like a cat in the dark
And then she is the darkness
She rules her life like a fine skylark-
And when the sky is starless-
All your life you’ve never seen-
A woman - taken by the wind
Would you stay if she promised you heaven
Will you ever win…
Dreams unwind.
Love’s a state of mind."*
I hate to ask, but does she sing “tard” for tired, or “hired” for hard. (I hope it’s the latter).
:rolleyes: Actually, it’s a “simile”, and it’s certainly not a good one in my opinion. The entire line doesn’t make much sense; why is his brain “squirming”? What’s it mean for a brain to squirm? And since when are toads particularly squirmy? Sure, the line is interpretable, but it’s not necessary - it’s only there to make the tune work; there would be no need to specify anything about his brain “squirming” (and seriously, toads squirm? They’re like the last thing I would think of if I was thinking about squirmy animals) except that it’s necessary for the scansion to work.
The Doors work a lot better if you don’t listen too closely to the lyrics.
This line from Billy Joel’s Piano Man has always bothered me:
And he’s talkin’ with Davy who’s still in the navy
Oh come on. Surely you remember the stage of boyhood when you were bound to pick up and manhandle every toad that came into your field of vision? When you do, they squirm like, well, toads.
People have been hearing a lot of things since any number of songs have come out, that doesn’t mean that they heard it correctly. I loved “Live and Let Die” when it came out, I anyways heard it as If, in, livin’…
I mostly remember them peeing like toads.
There’s a killer on the road
His brain is whizzing like a toad
Not pissing me off, but I always rather enjoyed Freddy Mercury’s last lines in One Vision.
Just gimme gimme gimme gimme
Fried chicken
I hate it when I laugh out loud at work and someone asks me what I’m laughing at. I can never tell them the truth. 
They played Paul Mc’s version of “Live and Let Die” on the radio this morning, it clearly had the words ‘but if this …’ and not ‘but in this …’ I wonder if the Live and Let die soundtrack is less clearly ennunciated?
I know The Streets have been mentioned, but seriously, this thread was invented for them.
Mike Skinner may well be a songwriting genius (ahem) but his lyrics have to be some of the clumsiest in the history of recorded music.
A brief selection, if I may:
From Dry Your Eyes
From When You Wasn’t Famous
And possibly the worst of the lot, from Fit But You Know It:
The vast majority of rap songs have multiple instances of deliberately mispronounced words, extended syllables, filer and etc. In one argument over the value of rap (I certainly accept it as music but am not a fan) a person once told me that this was “syncopating” and should be placed in the same category as jazz, but I countered then and hold now that it fits Robert Frost’s criticism of free verse poetry; “playing tennis with the net down.”
As much as I like large parts of his work, mainly in the first several years, Bob Dylan has gotten away with a lot of this crapola over the decades too.
The Turtles’ self-parody shouldn’t piss anyone off, they were trying to write a trite lyric.
Oh, and I can’t believe no one’s mentioned
If you say so
I know others have mentioned that “for to” isn’t an unknown word combination, but more generally, as I believe I’ve mentioned on this board before, that line exhibits perfectly ordinary Anglo-Saxon grammar, and could have come straight from Middle English. It’s not standard English, of course, but it’s not idiocy, either. Compare Chaucer’s lines “And palmeres for to seken straunge strondes” and “The hooly blisful martir for to seke” (to pick only the first two examples from the Prologue of The Canterbury Tales).