O'Meara: Much or most of Dylan's lyrics, and huge swaths of Paul Simon's, are gibberish to actual semantic analysis. So are most children's songs, many drinking songs, many shanties and work songs. Do we care? I wonder why not? I would like to think it is because the words are just filler for the melody, as in the "chin music" in which the tunes are "saved" by people who have no musical instruments, but I suspect a good deal of the time the jumbles of words (not the doodlydoo) are rather evocative in themselves, rather like the poetry of Dylan Thomas (for whom Zimmerman renamed himself and whom Simon mentioned in passing), in which phrases bring up mental images and words resonate with mood, though they are not subject to literal analysis. Is this perhaps another thread?