For a while back then I got to pondering Paul Simon’s “50 Ways to Leave Your Lover”. He wasn’t hugely popular in the UK during the mid-70s, and so I only heard the song a few months ago, and immediately I wondered why etc only five ways etc one of which isn’t much of a way etc. Linear drumming. The moustache, the hat; no.
At which point I discovered that my insights were not new. Indeed there was a thread back in 2008 on this very board on a similar topic:
However I decided to take a different tack. I wanted to apply scientific methods of industrial time-and-motion management to the problem of devising ways to leave your lover, and so I decided to create the fifty most efficient ways to express this concept with the English language. My constraints were (a) the names should be real names, male names, not restricted to Anglo-Saxon names but there should be at least a few real people on the internet with that name (b) the methods should rhyme, and fit the metre of the song - loosely, but enough so that you could imagine Paul Simon singing them (with perhaps “just” and “gonna” as verbal punctuation) and (c) not to copy Paul Simon’s original list, for his is the house of pain.
I’ve put the methodology here:
The most efficient way that I could think of was:
Go, Jo
There aren’t any one-letter English words that mean the same as “go”, and as a consequence of this - if you imagine that the formulation is like a hamburger - I can’t shave letters from the lower portion of the bun. And there aren’t any one-letter first names that rhyme with “go”, so the bun remains intact. In theory I could have used “O” but that’s not a name. Too much of a deviation from the concept. Might as well accept “I, I”, and have done with it. No. Resist. My goal is to impose order on the chaos. The cake shall not be left out in the rain.
The rest of the list proceeds like this:
Fly, Eli
Blow, Moe
Dash, Ash
Deny, Kai
Ebb, Webb
Fade, Ade
Cut, Mutt
Run, Alun
Adieu, Boo
Bolt, Walt
Buzz, Buzz
Dust, Just
Hike, Mike
Quit, Brit
Scram, Sam
Skim, Akim
Skip, Chip
Split, Kit
Cease, Rhys
Chill, Phil
Depart, Art
Shirk, Dirk
Shoot, Knut
Unass, Cass*
Whizz, Aziz
Break, Blake
Desert, Bert
Drive, Clive
Flee, Leslie
Go 'way, Jay
Jet, Ornette
Leave, Steve
Move on, Ron
Recede, Said
Rotate, Nate
Secede, Bede
Swerve, Merv
Unload, Joad
Forsake, Jake
Retreat, Pete
Conclude, Jude
Creep, Pradeep
Retire, Squire
Unhitch, Mitch
Vamoose, Moose
Withdraw, Thor
Detour, Seymour
Disappear, Amir
Melt, Roosevelt
It took fourteen hours; I fainted three times. But it is done. All for one and all for love.
- Oh, come on, have you never seen Hamburger Hill? Did you not fight in the Vietnam War? Away with you.