Ephemera

page bottom

Ephemera

Harvard University
Linguistics 80 Dialects of English
3/1/00
Assignment 3
Due before class on Monday, March 6.

Find in a song of your choice a short passage that contains non-standard English. (Non- standard here covers anything other than Standard American English.) Identify the band and the song, transcribe the line, and discuss briefly its non-standard features. A relatively detailed example: King Crimson, "Cat Food", 1970
No use to complain
If you're caught out in the rain;
Your mother's quite insane.
Cat food, cat food, cat food again.
Lady Yellow-Stamper with a fillet in a hamper
Dying to finish the course.
Goodies for the table with a fable on the label
Drowning in miracle sauce.
Dialect features to be found in this verse:
*

to complain
. I am not entirely sure that this usage is non-standard, but I for one would use
no
use
in
complain
ing
here. [An industrious student would ask around at this point to see if anyone else-particularly any Brits that can be tracked down-finds to complain
acceptable here.] It is also conceivable that the youthful British composer of these lyrics altered the expression to fit the rhyme and meter, but this is always a dangerous suggestion since it is clear that pop lyricists do not simply throw all grammatical rules out the window: one does not find Britney Spears singing "Do one time it more me to", for example.
*

quite . The Standard American equivalent in this sense is "completely";
quite insane
would in my opinion sound quite pretentious if used by an American. I believe that this sense of quite
is standard in British English, though.
*

again
is clearly designed to rhyme with
complain

,
rain
, and
insane
; in other words, the
lyricist most likely pronounces this word as [´»gejn], which is the pronunciation preferred by 20% of Brits surveyed for the Longman Pronunciation Dictionary. Interestingly, though, the singer pronounces it as [´»gEn], the form preferred by Americans and the other 80% of Brits. Given that the singer (Greg Lake) is British, his pronunciation may be an instance of the phenomenon wherein British rock singers of the 60s and 70s tried to sound American.
*

fillet
is pronounced [»fIl´t] (the standard British form, according to the Longman Pronunciation Dictionary), whereas in standard American it would be [f´»lej]. Note that the British stress pattern can be inferred even without hearing the actual recording. The line has the stress scheme ['...'...'...'.'.] (' = stressed beat, . = unstressed beat), consisting of four units of four beats each, where the first beat is normally stressed. If we used the American pronunciation of
fillet
, on the other hand, we would produce the awkward sequence
['...'....'..'.'.], with four consecutive unstressed beats.
*

It is clear from the rhyme scheme that
sauce
rhymes with
course
, whereas in standard
American English they do not ([sÅs] (or [sAs] for some speakers) vs. [kHç®s]). The singer pronounces these two forms in the standard British manner: [sç:s], [kHç:s]. Note that the British forms crucially differ in two ways, thereby allowing these forms to rhyme: 1) the
r
in course
is not pronounced, because it does not precede a vowel; 2) the vowel in sauce is [ç:] rather than [Å].

Please send comments to Bert Vaux
vaux@fas.harvard.edu

- Harvard University
School of Linguistics

Here is a curious post to the Kundalini Resource Center which (BTW) predates PtP:

Date: Tue, 13 May 1997 17:14:14 -1000 (HST)
From: Kim Kristensen
To: kundalini-l@execpc.com
Subject: AutoPost from Kundalini Resource Center
Message-Id: <199705140314.RAA11315@haleakala.aloha.net>

Not sure if this describes kundalini, but here goes:
When I was 14 years old I enjoyed the music of a group called
King Crimson. Soon after getting their first album, I sat in a
darkened room listening to "In the Court of the Crimson King".
The music rises to a crescendo, and when it did, so did I.
I felt a rush of energy, like electricity, go up my back and out the
top of my head. I stood bolt upright and was quite frightened.
I thought someting was wrong with me and that I had experienced some
kind of seizure. I did not practice any kind of yoga, was not into
any new age stuff, wasn't doing any drugs, and had never heard of
kundalini. I was only sitting quietly and focusing on the music I
loved.

So, what happened to me? Was it kundalini?
kim

- Kundalini Gateway Email List Archive:

Return to the Song Soup On Sea Homepage

Sign the Dreambook Read the Dreambook

- email -

Peter Sinfield
songsoup42 at yahoo dot com Jon Green (webmaster)
jrgreen73 at yahoo dot com

These Pages Created and Maintained usingArachnophilia
Copyright © 2001 ~ Song Soup On Sea /All rights reserved