The Mudcat Café TM
Thread #127788   Message #2855261
Posted By: semi-submersible
03-Mar-10 - 03:54 PM
Thread Name: Poor grammar in lyrics
Subject: RE: Poor grammar in lyrics
Good! My cookie's back at last.

David el Gnomo:
Yes, Kipling's grammar was correct there, but there should be another comma after "and" to make the phrase "which is more" a parenthetical phrase: If you can fill the unforgiving minute with sixty seconds' worth of distance run, yours is the Earth and everything that's in it; and, which is more, you'll be a Man, my son.

Yes, Don T, but I agree with Leeneia too. The medium must not obscure the message. Stopping the flow to figure something out can lose our interest. It doesn't matter how brilliant your ideas are if your audience does not get it.

If a singer speaks and no-one understands, does the song say anything?

Example: Primiti Too Taa. Lizzie Cornish, does this renowned Primitive Sound performance "take you WAY beyond grammar and into the realms of another world, where grammar was never even invented"? If "it is the way the singer interprets the song that makes the meaning clear" then how should a meaning (that "overrides ANY grammatical error") be made clear in this case? Does it stir your emotions? Vacuous fluency did make an instructive contrast with my expectations. Hey nonny no?

Lizzie C, without your correct use of grammar we'd not get the wit of your remarks about subjunctives. (And no, learning the subjunctive is optional because it's been withering in English for generations, possibly since the industrial era's increasingly mobile and international working classes started dismantling a few of the more troublesome features of English usage.)

Maybe brilliance (or poetry, Snuffy?) consists of developing something in the audience's mind that wasn't there before, but which makes sense according to all you know, because it agrees with most of the implicit rules you use to assemble and weigh ideas.