{"id":2312,"date":"2016-09-26T17:55:30","date_gmt":"2016-09-26T23:55:30","guid":{"rendered":"https:\/\/www.grammarbook.com\/blog\/?p=2312"},"modified":"2021-07-07T10:49:37","modified_gmt":"2021-07-07T15:49:37","slug":"pop-tunes-and-grammar","status":"publish","type":"post","link":"https:\/\/www.grammarbook.com\/blog\/pronouns\/pop-tunes-and-grammar\/","title":{"rendered":"Pop Tunes and Grammar"},"content":{"rendered":"

For many years I\u2019ve had a framed drawing sitting on my bookshelf. It\u2019s from the New Yorker<\/em> magazine, and it\u2019s by the brilliant cartoonist Roz Chast. It depicts a record album titled Miss Ilene Krenshaw Sings 100% Grammatically Correct Popular Tunes<\/em>.<\/p>\n

Songs include \u201cYou Aren\u2019t Anything but a Hound Dog,\u201d \u201cIt Doesn\u2019t Mean a Thing if It Hasn\u2019t Got That Swing,\u201d and \u201cI\u2019m Not Misbehaving.\u201d<\/p>\n

Note that all three songs, in their original form, contain ain\u2019t<\/em>: \u201cYou Ain\u2019t Nothin\u2019 but a Houn\u2019 Dog,\u201d \u201cIt Don\u2019t Mean a Thing if It Ain\u2019t Got That Swing,\u201d and \u201cAin\u2019t Misbehavin\u2019.\u201d Also, two of the three tunes feature words with the colloquial lopped-off g<\/em> (nothin\u2019<\/em>, misbehavin\u2019<\/em>). Saying ain\u2019t<\/em> and dropping g<\/em>\u2019s are timeless trademarks of popular music. They send the message that formality is out \u2026 prim and proper prigs and prudes can drop dead \u2026 let\u2019s party!<\/p>\n

For decades, \u201cMiss Ilene Krenshaw\u201d and her fellow nitpickers have cringed at the English-mangling pop music embraced by the young. Nowadays they especially deplore the damage it\u2019s doing to a literacy-challenged generation.<\/p>\n

But pop music\u2019s coarseness is part of its scruffy charm. Here are some examples I heard growing up:<\/p>\n

\u201cEverybody Loves a Lover\u201d<\/strong>\u00a0\u00a0This justly forgotten trifle was a hit for a slumming Doris Day in the late 1950s. I\u2019ll bet that back then, sticklers\u2019 teeth were grinding over this couplet: \u201cI should worry, not for nothin\u2019. \/ Everybody loves me, yes they do.\u201d In Miss Ilene Krenshaw\u2019s perfect world, Ms. Day would have sung: \u201cI should worry, not for anything. \/ Everybody loves me, yes he or she does.\u201d<\/p>\n

\u201cIt\u2019s Now or Never\u201d<\/strong>\u00a0\u00a0A torrid love song from Elvis at his absolute peak. The King had the ladies screaming and swooning when he first warbled this tune in 1960. Nonetheless, it contains one of the clunkiest mixed metaphors of all time: \u201cJust like a willow we would cry an ocean.\u201d What the \u2026?! OK, weeping willow, got it. And \u201ccry an ocean\u201d echoes the old ballad \u201cCry Me a River,\u201d a nice touch. But a tree that cries an ocean? Weird. Is this a torch song or a Guillermo del Toro movie?<\/p>\n

\u201cTouch Me\u201d<\/strong>\u00a0\u00a0It was a smash in 1968 for the Doors and their lead singer, troubled heartthrob Jim Morrison. I was a stickler-in-training when \u201cTouch Me\u201d came out, and I hated this line: \u201cI\u2019m gonna love you till the stars fall from the sky for you and I.\u201d My gripe: it should be \u201cfor you and me<\/em>.\u201d The sky<\/em>–I <\/em>rhyme might make it poetry, but it sure isn\u2019t good grammar. So I kept trying to rewrite it. Alas, the best line I ever came up with was \u201ctill the stars fall in the sea for you and me.\u201d<\/p>\n

\u201cLay Lady Lay\u201d<\/strong>\u00a0\u00a0This gorgeous, mildly risqu\u00e9 love song raised a lot of eyebrows in the late sixties. It was a big hit for Bob Dylan, who had recently reinvented himself as a Nashville crooner, with a mellifluous baritone no one at the time dreamed he had in him. The title gave the grammar patrol fits. Strictly speaking, it should be \u201cLie Lady Lie,\u201d which sounds awful, as if he\u2019s saying his lady is a compulsive liar. Sing it like that and you can kiss your hit record goodbye\u2014along with your street cred.<\/p>\n

\u2014Tom Stern<\/em><\/p>\n","protected":false},"excerpt":{"rendered":"

For many years I\u2019ve had a framed drawing sitting on my bookshelf. It\u2019s from the New Yorker magazine, and it\u2019s by the brilliant cartoonist Roz Chast. It depicts a record album titled Miss Ilene Krenshaw Sings 100% Grammatically Correct Popular Tunes. Songs include \u201cYou Aren\u2019t Anything but a Hound Dog,\u201d \u201cIt Doesn\u2019t Mean a Thing […]<\/p>\n","protected":false},"author":3,"featured_media":0,"comment_status":"open","ping_status":"closed","sticky":false,"template":"","format":"standard","meta":{"_acf_changed":false,"footnotes":""},"categories":[32,16,25,8,43,23],"tags":[],"class_list":["post-2312","post","type-post","status-publish","format-standard","hentry","category-abbreviations","category-apostrophes","category-humor","category-pronouns","category-subject-and-verb-agreement","category-verbs"],"acf":[],"aioseo_notices":[],"_links":{"self":[{"href":"https:\/\/www.grammarbook.com\/blog\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts\/2312"}],"collection":[{"href":"https:\/\/www.grammarbook.com\/blog\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts"}],"about":[{"href":"https:\/\/www.grammarbook.com\/blog\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/types\/post"}],"author":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/www.grammarbook.com\/blog\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/users\/3"}],"replies":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/www.grammarbook.com\/blog\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/comments?post=2312"}],"version-history":[{"count":1,"href":"https:\/\/www.grammarbook.com\/blog\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts\/2312\/revisions"}],"predecessor-version":[{"id":5160,"href":"https:\/\/www.grammarbook.com\/blog\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts\/2312\/revisions\/5160"}],"wp:attachment":[{"href":"https:\/\/www.grammarbook.com\/blog\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/media?parent=2312"}],"wp:term":[{"taxonomy":"category","embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/www.grammarbook.com\/blog\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/categories?post=2312"},{"taxonomy":"post_tag","embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/www.grammarbook.com\/blog\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/tags?post=2312"}],"curies":[{"name":"wp","href":"https:\/\/api.w.org\/{rel}","templated":true}]}}