They've got cars big as bars

[cosmolinguist]

Today I did something I've been meaning to do since early Friday evening.

I found the "Fairytale of New York" mp3 and played it. On repeat.


I think Andrew thinks I'm playing when I say I don't want to sing something.

Like the_forecast telling me I can do Super Smash Bros. Melee, and then watching me not even manage to choose which character I'm going to be.

Or like comradexavier telling me Risk is easy and everyone can figure it out, and then me crashing and burning almost immediately because I have no talent or skill at strategy.

My boyfriends should listen to me more.

I'm sure Andrew did listen. I know he heard me say "But I don't know the words!" ... but he also probably saw some glint in my eye or something, because I love "Fariytale of New York," and verlaine even said once that it's his favorite karaoke track, and how can you argue with an endorsement like that?

Well, you could try I don't know the words. But I wouldn't recommend it; that one didn't work for me. In many other respects Andrew knows there's a difference between a good song and a good karaoke song--he often says himself that he doesn't want anything to do with melodies, because he can't sing them--but if it's about me, he's never impressed by professed incompetence.

Maybe that's because my reason is unique: the whole point of karaoke is that it tells you the words. But it tells you them in a way that can be pretty unhelpful if you're half blind!

The first part of the song is easy: a couple long slow verses, all sung by Male Voice. Ha ha. I stand around and watch. demiurgician thinks there's something wrong with me. I wait. But then it gets fast! And I think Oh shit! That's when Kirsty MacColl starts singing...! And I still have no idea what the words are! I probably could read them off the screen--I can always read them--but not soon enough to do me any good!


"I told you!" I shouted repeatedly at Andrew afterwards, but it didn't help.

He tried to tell me all the words, "Theyvegotcarsbigasbarstheyvegotriversofgold," but since he did it just like that, with no spaces between the words, I had no idea what he was talking about. So that didn't help either.

But I don't want to give up on the song just because that sucked, I told myself. I shall do my homework.

So that's why I played it four or five times now (mostly while I took a shower, which is good because everyone can sing in the shower). I'm better at the lyrics now, but I feel a little weird. Approaching the song as homework made me forget what a fucking good song it is. I'd make you all listen to it, if I could.

And a little weird because Andrew and I sang it together, too. It was fun to get to call him names--especially "You scum bag, you maggot, you cheap lousy faggot," which just rolls off the tongue; try it!

And after that comes the line that the whole audience screams at Shane MacGowan in the live version we have somewhere. "I coulda been someone," he sings, all rough and charming and Irish, and then Kirsty MacColl or everyone in the world or me comes back with "Well so could anyone!" ... a harsh truth, even when set to lively folk chord changes.

Then Female Voice sings, "You took my dreams from me, when I first found you." Any time when I haven't just listened to this song a bunch, I'd probably just blow this off, but now I have to remind myself this is not real. No one took my dreams from me. Songs I sing at karaoke are not my life. I just never had any dreams in the first place...

Male Voice's reply is "I kept them with me, babe. I put them with my own. Can't make it all alone. I built my dreams around you." And then, though I still hear the rough voice of a man known for many songs and few teeth, I see someone else.

And I'm sure I would have thought of him even if we'd never sung it at karaoke, if I'd ever actually bothered to think about it.

Comments

[stealthmunchkin.livejournal.com]

I am, however, a scumbag, maggot, and cheap lousy faggot...

[classytart.livejournal.com]

That is one of only two bits of christmas music (carols, pop songs etc) that I can stand, and the only one I actively love. It's a great track.

[cosmolinguist]

Andrew always says he likes how this gets played in department stores and stuff at Christmas, as if it's a normal Christmas song and not about junkies and drunks.

[demiurgician.livejournal.com]

Wait, when did I think there was something wrong with you?

[cosmolinguist]

I just remember you looking at me and saying "Go sing!" and not being all that impressed when I said that it wasn't my part of the song yet. But maybe you just couldn't hear me.

[demiurgician.livejournal.com]

Definitely couldn't hear you, 'cause I never thought you were messing up or anything, I barely even know that song :-) And, frankly, if you *were* messing up I wouldn't be unimpressed, 'cause whatever dude, it's karaoke!

[kwakhed.livejournal.com]

i find that if i don't know the words but do know the melody, i can get by with the words on the screen. if it's the other way around, it doesn't work at all for me. that to me is like having words but no grammar for connecting them properly.

[cosmolinguist]

I need to know the words just because my sight is bad in such a way that even stuff I can actually decipher takes me a minute, and by then I've totally made an idiot of myself. This has happened a few times now. :-)

[ivana-duboise.livejournal.com]

I'm pretty sure it's not but is this the No Use For A Name version?

[cosmolinguist]

I told you about the Pogues, remember? I said you'd like them because I know you like Flogging Molly and they're just a watered-down version of what the Pogues do best: that punk/Irish thing. There are a couple of albums' worth of their stuff on our computer; check it out when you get the chance.

[miss-newham.livejournal.com]

I loved that song first because I loved Kirsty, and she makes the song - and the harmony line she sings in the chorus is just the best. Good luck another time...

[cosmolinguist]

Yeah, she's great. Now that I'm getting this lyric thing figured out, I've already come across my next problem, which is that I have a range closer to Shane MacGowan's than Kirsty MacColl's; I'll never sound that good. :-) But that'll never stop me from singing it.

Word choice

[comradexavier.livejournal.com]

Go back and read that sentence again. Does it really have any less impact without the f? Your writing is too good—too literate—for such language. It might work in dialogue, but profanity is as natural in your narration as a sperm whale is in the Sahara. Don't write down to it.

Re: Word choice

[stealthmunchkin.livejournal.com]

It read as perfectly natural to me. What *would* be bad is if Holly - or anyone - deliberately restricted her choice of words due to some imagined concept of morality in language.
Refusal to use *any* word is an unnatural restriction on one's powers of expression.

Re: Word choice

[comradexavier.livejournal.com]

I didn't attempt to make a moral argument, or even insist that profanity never be used. What I reject is using it casually. Used casually, its power of expression is roughly zero. I can say, "I really hate loud motorcycles," or "I really fucking hate those fucking loud motorcycles," but the latter doesn't mean I hate them more, it just makes me sound less intelligent, or perhaps very angry.

Particularly, I object when fucking is used off-hand as some sort of superlative qualifier. Far from enhancing the language, doing so actually reduces its expressiveness, because now the word no longer retains force as a noun meaning particularly crude or forceful sexual intercourse. Now I have to say, "When I walked in, they were fucking fucking." The word loses fifty percent of its expressiveness; I have to say it twice to get to the same meaning.

In all honesty, my comment was retrospectively more forceful than it needed to be. I suppose I was feeling verbose at the time. I should have used my usual tactic to point out the absurdity and written only, "Just who is that song fucking, anyway?"

Re: Word choice

[stealthmunchkin.livejournal.com]

Whereas to me, and to most people I know, the situation is reversed. I have never used the word 'fucking' to refer to sexual intercourse, and very few if any of the people I know do so. On the other hand *everyone* I know uses it as a superlative.
Words change their meanings, and the word 'fucking' now doesn't primarily mean 'having sexual intercourse' (and *never* primarily meant 'particularly crude or forceful sexual intercourse'). Dictionary.com brings up three definitions for 'fucking' - http://dictionary.reference.com/search?q=fucking. The first, as a verb, where it's included in the definition of 'fuck', has "To have sexual intercourse with." as *one* of the definitions (admittedly the first one) along with several other meanings. The other two read:

fuck·ing ( P ) Pronunciation Key (fkng) Vulgar Slang
adv. & adj.
Used as an intensive.
(American Heritage Dictionary)

fucking

adj : (used of persons) informal intensifiers; "what a bally (or blinking) nuisance"; "a bloody fool"; "a crashing bore"; "you flaming idiot" [syn: bally(a), blinking(a), bloody(a), blooming(a), crashing(a), flaming(a), fucking(a)] n : slang terms for sexual intercourse [syn: fuck, screw, screwing, ass, nooky, nookie, piece of ass, piece of tail, roll in the hay, shag, shtup] adv : intensifier, very colloquial; "what took you so fucking long?"
Source: WordNet ® 2.0, © 2003 Princeton University

So all three definitions say that 'fucking' is an intensifier, and two of them have that meaning as more important than the 'sexual intercourse' meaning. NONE have "particularly crude or forceful sexual intercourse" as a definition (and incidentally in the context in which you used it that would be a verb, not a noun).

So her use is correct within modern accepted usage, and yours isn't...

[comradexavier.livejournal.com]

Again, you misinterpret my argument. I'm not trying to establish that any particular use is wrong. Right and wrong are moral arguments; I explicitly disclaimed moral arguments in my first reply.

Furthermore, your argument this time is a classic appeal-to-the-majority fallacy (http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Appeal_to_the_majority), and your references to dictionaries add nothing, because the definitions in dictionaries tend to follow the majority of use. While your assertion that word meanings change might seem like ample justification that the majority is the authority on language, consider this: it must also then be true that American English spellings are correct (as opposed to British English spellings), because American speakers of English outnumber British speakers of English almost five-to-one.

My argument is—and is only—that I find casual use of profanity to be empty and a detriment to the expressiveness of the language. I do not mind if you think I am wrong—many people do, as you have pointed out—but if you want to contend the point, please have the good grace to do so by countering the arguments I actually make.

[stealthmunchkin.livejournal.com]

If we are to throw out both dictionaries and usage, what precisely are we left with to define the meaning of a word?
Holly's usage of the word 'fucking' was not casual - it's very obvious that her word choices are very precise indeed, and having seen the way she remorselessly edits her entries before (and indeed after) presenting them to the world, I would not call *any* of her word choices casual. The infrequency with which she uses that word should also show that when she *does* use the word, it's for a purpose.
And I do not think that using a word in a way that is both correct according to its dictionary definition and the way the word is colloquially used is in any way harmful to the expressiveness of the language. On the contrary - I think *refraining* from using the correct word in those circumstances would be harmful.

[comradexavier.livejournal.com]

If you will pardon me the liberty, I will answer your first question last.

You are correct; she even said below that she took fucking out and then put it back in, so perhaps casual is not applicable in this instance (although casual use is, as far as I can tell, how the word became an intensifier). On a different note, it may even be a practical use, since I am apparently the only person who minds.

However, I think that empty fits well, because fucking doesn't have a well defined meaning in this context. I know that it is supposed to increase the strength of the song's 'goodness,' but fucking doesn't tell me anything about why. There are a plethora of other words she could have used that do tell me why:

• miraculously (she thinks by all rights it should have been much worse),
• amazingly or unbelievably (she is always surprised at how good it is),
• incredibly (when she says it's good, others have a tendency to not believe her),
• strangely (she feels odd that she likes it as much as she does),
• ...and many others that might highlight a particular quality of the song or singer, et cetera.

In addition to weakening the impact of the verb form (where I grew up, saying fucking turned heads; maybe that's why I associate it as a crude term) I find this sort of empty use of fucking detrimental to the expressiveness of the language because it reduces the active vocabulary. In extreme cases, everything becomes "fucking good" or "fucking bad." It's very Orwellian, actually; just substitute doubleplusgood.

I don't think you've considered the implication of that last point: if omitting a "correct" word is harmful, do we have an obligation to include every such word when we communicate? Do I have to ask that you leave your shoes by the rectangular gray latched locked hinge-hung wooden solid thick wide tall durable heavy well-lit unyielding (etc.) door? Or would you agree that such a requirement would be so unwieldy as to make the language useless (considering the sheer variety of words available in English)?

At the most base level, I think that the meaning of words is always defined by agreement of the people communicating. Because we both speak essentially the same language, most of the time that agreement is implicit. That's what makes a language useful—we don't have to work how to communicate every time we want to say something. We really are nitpicking here, because neither one of use was confused by the other's use; we just have different preferences.

On the other hand, nitpicking can make for good arguments, since no one is usually very personally invested in the outcome. I haven't had this much fun with an argument for months, but in any case, I think this will be my last comment on the subject here.

[cosmolinguist]

It doesn't seem to me that Andrew meant right and wrong in any kind of a moral sense--he doesn't think use of fucking is Evil or Good.

And it doesn't make a lot of sense to use this kind of logic in linguistic manners; appealing to the majority is not a fallacy, it's prescriptive grammar. The prescriptive (like you) and the descriptive (like Andrew) camps battle in all languages, some doing better in one area than the other--French has an Academy that dictates from on high which words should be "allowed" for what; English has always been an amalgamtion of old and new words from the Romans, Celts, Germanic tribes, Scandinavians, Normans, and whoever else invaded or was invaded by this one little island in the last couple thousand years.

According to what authorities it does have--like the OED--English is never as prescriptive as you're hoping for it to be; it would never say that American English is more "correct" than British English, even if it were true that American English were more widely used (though that's debatable anyway, as Ireland Canada, Australia, India, and several other former colonies use, more or less, the British standards).

And to go back to the original point, it's fine if you want to say that profanity should not be used casually; I would not argue that. I would argue that intepretation of my use of it in this post, though, because I was not casual about it.

I mean, it seems silly now that such a big deal has been made of this, but I think "Fairytale of New York" is an incredible song--full of hope, innocence, love, despair, loss, cynicism, beauty, sentimentality ... and music that manages to get most of this across even if, like me, you can't understand the words the first or twelfth or millionth time you listen to the song. If I used base, coarse language there, it's only because the song moves me to such a degree that my vocabulary, resplendent as it may usually be, seems reduced to fairly base, coarse words. They seem to best and most succinctly express what I wanted to express at the time. It may not have been an incredibly considered opinion--LiveJournal is, after all, a fairly informal medium--but I do not swear often or wantonly, especially in text (in speech I'm always a little more foolhardy and haphazard, as I'm sure you know), and I did reconsider the inclusion of the word fucking before deciding to keep it, as I said. It was not lightly or thoughtlessly done. I just won't refrain from using the words I want merely because other people use them stupidly.

If anything, I'm trying to set a good example. ;-)

[comradexavier.livejournal.com]

You're right about casual; in the comment I was just finishing as you posted this, I clarified that casual use describes the source of the way you used the word, not your particular instance.

...I think "Fairytale of New York" is an incredible song--full of hope, innocence, love, despair, loss, cynicism, beauty, sentimentality ... and music that manages to get most of this across even if, like me, you can't understand the words the first or twelfth or millionth time you listen to the song.

If only you had written this description in the first place. It conveys volumes to me—what you think of the song and how it affects you. Maybe everyone else gets it and I'm just deficient, but I don't receive any of that message when I read the word fucking.

I hope that this argument hasn't been taken as a big deal; I certainly didn't mean it that way. I have been arguing for the same reasons I usually argue: it makes me (and hopefully others) think about things and in ways not usually considered—not to mention that I enjoy a good argument. In any case, go ahead and write using whatever words you like. I promise I won't bring it up again.

[cosmolinguist]

Yeah, this has ended up being kind of a big deal. :-) But I'm familiar enoug with how and why you argue about stuff to have a pretty good guess at why you're doing it--not to criticize me, but just because you're thinking about a thing, and you've gotten me (and apparently Andrew) thinking about it, too, which is cool. I've also seen you use your taking-swear-words literally approach to much humorous effect in the past, so I know where you're coming from there. And I could've easily written in the first place the few-sentence description of the song that I just gave you; you're right, that would've been better. I don't know why I didn't, except that I'm lazy and wasn't feeling as articulate at the time as I apparnetly was last night (but when I've had a bit to drink I always think I can talk about everything better :-)).

[cosmolinguist]

I think it might've gotten in there because it's the sort of thing Andrew would say about something he really likes. He tells me he lives in a culture where profanity is used as punctuation--sprinkled liberally throughout their speech. It's definitely annoying when people who are lazy or just have small vocabularies try to use such language as intensifiers, especially because they tend to overuse it. But I don't think that means there's no use for it.

If I remember right, I wrote fucking, deleted it, and then put it back again. Because I thought it did have more impact. Guess I was wrong. :-) In your eyes, anyway. Or else it just wasn't worth it, in this case. You're right that it's unusual to me, but not quite unheard of. It shows up a lot when I'm stressed. :-) And then I think it does mean something. Here, I dunno, a bit less so; this is a lot closer to being the sort of meaningless intensifier I talked about.

Even so, it only got half a second's thought from me, so I'm glad you commented, because that's got me thinking about what makes words bad and other interesting stuff.

[comradexavier.livejournal.com]

As I replied above—and as I'm sure you'll recall—I have a tendency to insist that people say what they mean, including using words that denotatively mean what they are saying.

I think part of the reason it stood out so much to my eye is that at the very least, it wants to be an exclamation, the tone of which that sentence and indeed that whole paragraph, decidedly do not have.

[cosmolinguist]

I think I'm doomed to connotations, but I like it that way.

I know what you mean about what a shame it is that gay never means "happy" anymore, and all that ... but at the same time, I think "When I walked in, they were fucking fucking" is funny. I guess I don't mind anyone merely pointing out the semantic change, I just mind trying to correct for that.

The English language has never had an orderly or guided evolution; a little bit of chaos has proved good for it, making it resilient, adaptive and flexible as well as, yes, sometimes degenerate. It means there are still plenty of words that mean "happy." And you could always try inventing a new one.

[comradexavier.livejournal.com]

I don't deny that the language changes; to do so would be absurd. Look at it as a physics problem: the language as a whole is an enormous mass, and everyone who speaks the language pushes on it a little bit in some random direction. When a lot of people happen to pick up the same usage, the little forces add up and the language moves.

Most of the time people do this unconsciously, but that doesn't mean that I can't decide to push back when I see the language moving in a direction I don't particularly like. Most of the time my little force will be overcome, but sometimes, if I'm lucky, I might find others who will agree with me and add their forces to mine.

To throw in another analogy, it's a lot like voting: if all the people who think about it walk away because they decide it's hopeless, then it's the people who do it without thinking who decide the outcome.

[cosmolinguist]

I don't think language is that much like physics or voting, though. I don't think it should be. It doesn't have "laws" like physics does, it doesn't have elections. I guess my little force just doesn't coincide with yours on this point.

[madscience.livejournal.com]

Would that be the Pogues' version?

I wonder what other favorite artists we have in common.

[cosmolinguist]

Yes, it would be.

What else do you like?

[madscience.livejournal.com]

All kinds of things! Some of my favorites are Counting Crows, Live, Crash Test Dummies, Loreena McKennitt, Rage Against the Machine, Bone Thugs 'N' Harmony, Portishead, Matchbox Twenty...

[cosmolinguist]

I was a huge fan of August and Everything After (largely thanks to my friend Seth getting me to listen to more than just the singles from it), but later Counting Crows stuff seems to lack that luster--Seth hypothesized that Adam Duritz writes better songs when he's depressed. And I recognize the name Loreena McKennitt, but I have only a vague idea of what her music is like--though it's a vague idea of goodness.

[madscience.livejournal.com]

I didn't care much for Recovering The Satellites either, except for a couple tracks, and I've only heard a couple tracks from This Desert Life. But I really like Hard Candy.

I think a lot of musicians have about one good album in them, but they get locked into contracts for more and can't deliver. Alanis Morissette is a shining example.

I have a hunch you would like Live. Throwing Copper and The Distance To Here are my favorite albums from them. I recommend checking out The Distance. Secret Samadhi only has one or two good tracks on it, V is good but different, and I haven't heard much of the others.