When it comes to joining Facebook affinity groups, grammar lovers have lots of choices. Take, for example, the group whose motto is “Punctuation saves lives.” It’s called “Let’s Eat Grandma!’” or “Let’s eat, Grandma!” Martha and Grant talk about their favorite tongue-in-cheek Facebook groups for grammar lovers. Also this week: when to use apostrophes, whether to distinguish between bring and take, and the difference between a murphy and a wedgie.
This episode first aired March 13, 2010. Listen here:
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Martha and Grant share some favorite Facebook groups:
Ambrose Bierce was the baddest-ass lexicographer who ever lived.
I judge you when you use poor grammar.
I judge you when you call acceptable usage ‘poor grammar.’
People Who Always Have To Spell Their Names For Other People
Of course, you can also find A Way with Words on Facebook.
Ever notice how you can sing the lyrics of “Amazing Grace” to the theme from “Gilligan’s Island”—or for that matter, to “The House of the Rising Sun”? Turns out there are many more examples of this. Is there a word for this musical phenomenon? (Did you know Garrison Keillor can sing “Amazing Grace” to theme song of The Mickey Mouse Club.)
A Connecticut listener says her Generation Y friends make fun of her when she describes something happening in fits and starts. Is it that antiquated a phrase? Where does it come from, anyway?
Quiz Guy Greg Pliska has a quiz about famous trios. Try this one: “Steve Martin, Martin Short, and ___________?”
If someone gives you crazy props or mad props, they’re congratulating you. A Chicago college student wants to know what props means in this context.
What’s the difference between bring and take?
When someone grabs your underwear from behind and gives it a good, vertical yank, it’s called a wedgie. A caller knows that term, but wonders whether and how a wedgie differs from a murphy or a melvin.
Grant quizzes Martha about the meaning of several rhyming verb and noun phrases: cuff and stuff, the cherries and blueberries, chew and screw, eat it and beat it, and flap and zap.
A Lawrenceville, Georgia, woman wonders: If chalkboards go the way of the buggy whip, what simile will replace the expression nails on a chalkboard?
Grant answers a listener’s email question about the meaning of the musical phrase chicky-wah-wah.
A caller from Veroqua, Wisconsin, is fascinated by hoarfrost and wonders about the origin of its name. Grant explains its relation to the English term hoary.
The mother of a boy named Hendrix wonders how to punctuate the possessive of his name. Should she add an apostrophe or apostrophe with an “s”? Hendrix’ or Hendrix’s?
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There is a comedian, Bob Rivers, who specializes in putting new lyrics on familiar tunes. I especially remember a couple Christmas albums with songs such “O Little Town of Bethleham” sung to to “The House of the Rising Sun” and “I Am Santa Clause” to the tune of “I Am Ironman” and “Walkin’ ‘Round In Women’s Underwear” to “Winter Wonderland”
Grant Barrett said:
Peter Schickele, creator of PDQ Bach and erstwhile host of “Schickele Mix”, could sing Robert Frost’s “Stopping by Woods on a Snowy Evening” to the tune of the tango classic “Hernando’s Hideaway”.
I was on a music team for a weekend spiritual retreat, and we decided among ourselves that we were not going to use the traditional tune for Amazing Grace, so we were trying to think of other tunes that would fit: House of the Rising Sun, Gilligan’s Island, the Coke song (“I’d like to teach the world to sing”), Joy to the World, It Came upon a Midnight Clear (which I like because it fittingly shifts to minor chords right at the “dangers, toils and snares” line)…
One of the leaders came over to see what we were doing, looked at our list, then asked, “How come no one ever sings ‘House of the Rising Sun’ to the tune of ‘Gilligan’s Island’? (I almost burst out laughing.)
sing one song to the tune of another – I don’t know if there is a word for exactly that, but it is based on meter, that is, the number of syllables in each line. For example, Amazing Grace is 8.6.8.6., also known as Common Meter. You can read the Wiki article at .
Back when I was into filking, the Tolkien fans discovered that most of the poetry in the Hobbit and the Lord of the Rings had the same meter as the Camptown Races. Thus, you would have
A! Elbereth Gilthoniel, Doo Dah, Doo Dah
silivren penna míriel, All the Doo Dah Day
Filking is a much broader that simply singing one song to another’s tunes. It also covers song parodies and original music/words for the various genres of fantasy and science fiction.
I sure hadn’t heard all these examples. They’re great! Keep ‘em coming!
I’m now trying to find a suitable piece of music for “The Blind Men and the Elephant” by John Godfrey Saxe. That six-lines-per-stanza thing is making it difficult.
punctuation – The first piece in PDQ Bach’s A Consort of Choral Christmas Carols uses the now-you-hear-it-now-you-don’t punctuation for effect throughout. The music emphasizes the contrast between such lines in each verse.
http://www.schickele.com/composition/consortchristmas.htm
Thank you to Professor Peter Schickele for his hard work in “discovering” or uncovering the works of this deservedly unknown (LOL) composer.
My wife and I just had the pleasure this past weekend of seeing the off-Broadway production of the rapid-fire comedy Mr. and Mrs. Fitch, a play by Douglas Carter Beane (who also wrote To Wong Foo, Thanks for Everything! Julie Newmar and The Little Dog Laughed). In it Beane, via Mr. Fitch (Lithgow), remarks how many newspaper (New York Post) headlines can be sung to the tune of Camptown Races, with an added doo-dah, doo-dah. John Lithgow and Jennifer Ehle, keep you laughing, concentrating, and “introspecting” in such rapid succession, that you have no time to marvel at their skill till the play is over.
The Variety review mentions the doo-dahbility of New York Post headlines:
Doo-Dah
An actual example from the New York Post and the play:
HEADLESS BODY IN TOPLESS BAR
(Doo-dah. Doo-dah.)
(New York Post, 1982)
Just this past Friday night, I was teaching a worship and music class for our conference lay ministers’ academy and used the Amazing Grace words + Gilligan’s Island tune as an example of how to use familiar words in a new context to change the feeling of a worship service. As a preacher, I find nothing to be more disconcerting than ending a segment of a service with excitement only to have that segment followed by a dirge-like hymn, no matter how appropriate the words, “Amazing grace, how sweet the sound…”, would be.
And just today, before I even got the e-mail with the topic of the show, I finished rewriting a Gospel story to fit the theme from Gilligan’s Island for Holy Humor Sunday on April 11. Now I want to watch a few episodes for old times’ sake!
–Rev. Ruth
I was thinking that a good name for the Lyric Swap-able songs might be Homometers as they have the same meter as the other tunes.
Perhaps we could pronounce this Hahm-a-meter.
So we could say that “Oh My Darling Clementine” and “The Ode To Joy” are Homometers to each other.
-Ken Larson
Porltand, OR
They’re also meter-equivalent to the Marine Corps Hymn, to my father’s never-ending annoyance.
Has anyone yet suggested the term “mashup” for these combinations of one song’s words with another’s tune? I know the term covers a lot more ground than that (Weird Al Yankovic’s song “eBay” to the tune of the Backstreet Boys’ “I Want It That Way”, expertly blended with the Four Tops’ “Baby I Need Your Loving”, for example), but surely it’s a subset of that kind of thing.
To change the subject to another item on this show, the “chicka wow wow” phrase is one of the more comment-inspiring parts of a viral video called “kittens inspired by kittens”, in which a 5-year-old girl provides captions for pictures found in a book about kittens.
I want to endorse modhran’s “homometer”, though we may assume that it it will be mispronounced “hah-MAHM-it-ur”, as though it was a device for measuring (or metric unit of) “homoms”. It also runs the risk of being misconstrued (as all words beginning “homo” inevitably are by hoi polloi) as relating to homosexuality (“not that there’s anything wrong with that”).
As for the Glenn’s comment about news headlines and “Camptown Races”, I wonder if anyone here has seen the “Doo-Dah News” ticker at badgods.com/doodahnews.html? Big fun there.
Perhaps “transpo-tunes” or “modular music”? Dare we go to “thesauritonic”? Ugh! Sounds like Titanic’s ugly sister…
navarre said:
I think it sounds like a cough syrup you’d give to a sick dinosaur.
johng423 said:
I think the official name of this is Metric(al) Equivalence, and the songs are called Metric(al) Equivalents. Several (older?) hymnbooks have indices in the back. One of those indices might be A Metric Index of Tunes. Such an index is provided to allow precisely for this substitution of tunes with lyrics. There are countless possibilities within most hymnbooks. I find that using unfamiliar words with familiar hymn tunes works best for congregational singing. For solo work, the reverse is true.
But I like to call them “toodatunas,” or “tunas” for short.
[edit: added the following]
In looking at a metric list of hymns in one hymnbook, just this morning I discovered the following “tuna:”
Amazing Grace (Common Meter 86.86)
America the Beautiful (Common Meter Double 86.86.86.86)
So you can sing the words to Amazing Grace to the tune of America the Beautiful, fitting two verses of lyrics into a single verse of music. It works quite well, since the lyric verses run closely together into a single narrative.
I was too scared to try Gilligan’s Island to the tune of America the Beautiful
I vote for Homometer.
As a kid, we also sang Amazing Grace to the Coke Song “I’d like to buy the world a home…” ending it with “He’s the real thing, Christ is, What the world needs today/ He’s the real thing.”
AND
we sang it to the tune of “House of the Rising Sun.” (I always preferred minor keys, myself.)
One upbeat, one even slower and solemn and, well, potentially dirgelike.
Interchangable parts! It’s like playing Maestro Potato Head. heh
Grant Barrett said:
I have a nominee for the “Let’s eat Grandma” award for copy editing. Please refer to the online version of what, in print version, appears on the front page with headline type font. It is an article intending to commemorate the one-year anniversary of the Bull Market’s return to Wall Street but, in the end — the wrong end — coming out with a very different message:
Happy Birthday Bull! (click for article)
johng423 said:
Another good one that I don’t believe has been mentioned yet is “Ghost Riders in the Sky”. Because of the pause in the melody in the middle of the fourth couplet of each verse, it’s especially effective with those lyrics that save their “punch” for the last line. Try it with “America the Beautiful”.
(Probably works better if you’re a bass-baritone, like me.)
I have been playing with music for years and I have always used the word interpolation. When I play a “cover” song I follow the theatrical rule that says you can’t change or add a word, but you can do anything else. Interpolation may have the larger meaning of simply changing a piece of music, but I can’t pass up the scat-tastic warmth of in-ter-po-la-tion.
Being in The Salvation Army, I know a lot of songs like the “Amazing Grace” “Gilligian’s Island” song. William Booth used to go into the bars and listen to the sngs that were being sung. He then changed those words to Christian words, and he is even noted for saying, “Why should the Devil have all the good music?” Even today, if you look in The Salvation Army Tune book, you will see “My Bonny Lies Over The Ocean” and “Home on the Range.” Of course, we’ve slowed those melodies down a little and they’ve been “Christianized.” Usually when I am singing “Home on the Range” to myself the words get mixed up. My version goes like this: Give me a home, The Salvation Army’s words are: Come beautiful Christ,
Where the buffalo roam Radiate thy beauty in me,
Where the deer and the antelope play, ‘Tis thee I adore,
‘Tis thee I adore, What can I ask more,
What can I ask more, Then to live for thee beautiful Christ.
Then to live for thee beautiful Christ.
I think that scraping your fork on your plate does the same thing and scraping your nails down a chalkboard. I don’t think that we will stop using plates or forks for a long time, so this might be a better phrase to use in the future, or when chalkboards are gone. Also, I have a friend that will only give out props when someone “fails.” Instead of saying “Fail” or “epic fail”, she sarcastically says, “That’s great. I give you props.”
Along the same lines as “homometer”, why not “symmetry”?
In my younger days with both the Society for Creative Anachronism (SCA), and the Science Fiction fan/convention groups, I spent a lot of time with the filkers. I have to say, I like homometer. The word filk used as a verb, would be to compose the song or perform it. But the song would not be ‘a filk’. A filk is the gathering of people who do filk.
And since we are talking about the slang of particular cultures, I want to throw in a couple of my favorites from the re-enactor circuit.
Brass Hats-The officially crowned members of a medieval re-enactment group.
Popsy-A young lady who has more enthusiasm than common sense.
Plastic Castle-The portable plastic outhouses common to temporary festivals.
Stick Jock-Combatants in the medieval events who come only for the combat.
Period Police-Individuals who are primarily concerned with the historic accuracy rather than the flavor or intent.
Garbage bag-The gym bag, duffel bag, or suit bag one carries their clothing (garb) in.
In service to the Midrealm,
ld. Philip Galen Nicodemus.
*er*
Phil
On the topic of “nails on a chalkboard” I have heard two very close sayings that are synonymous to this. 1) a shovel on concrete and 2) shovel scrapping concrete. Both are used exactly the same way, mainly by people about 25 – 35, though it is not as common as nails on a chalkboard. I have heard it in Orange County, LA and in San Diego, with Orange County being the most frequent. This may be the result of nearly continous construction noise of our urban sprawl.
I’ve heard a number of things said to be as annoying as the fingernails, but most are confined to a subset of people:
How was the complaint resolved?
Emmett
16 Candles, 76 Trombones, Addams Family, theme to Dallas, Munsters, Mingulay Boat Song, Rising Sun, and Scooby Doo have all donated their melodies to Amazing Grace. A group called The Corsairs did it on the end of one of their CDs.
Difference between “bring” and “take”
When I married an Australian-born daughter of Dutch immigrants in the seventies, I was puzzled by her use of bring/take. Her only language was Dutch until she started school.
I finally decided that there were 2 competing systems (between her usage and mine):
1. in standard English, we use BRING with the destination HERE and TAKE with the destination THERE.
2. In standard Dutch and German, they use BRING with the direction TO and TAKE with the direction FROM.
I suspect that the longer influence of Germanic languages in the US has changed regional usage considerably.
As Grant said in the show, this simple dichotomy is muddled a bit with phrasal verbs.
Love the show.
Paulus (in Sydney)
Gracious sakes, this is so much great stuff, I don’t know where to begin! I guess I will by casting a vote for “homometer” (rhyming with “thermometer”). Thanks, ya’ll — we’ll have to revisit some of these responses in a future episode for sure.
I’d like to weigh in on the question of substituting lyrics.
First, I’d vote against homometer. The musical term “meter” is not equivalent to the poetic term. In poetry, of course, meter refers to the number of feet in a line, based on patterns of emphasis (a-MA-zing GRACE how SWEET the SOUND that SAVED a WRETCH like ME=7 iambic feet). While meter in music was used in this way for hymns, (as mentioned in the term “common meter” above), the musical term meter refers much more specifically to how many beats there are in a bar.
To keep it simple, “Amazing Grace” is in 3. This means you can count to three in equal spaces over and over until the song is over. “Amazing Grace” begins with 3 and continues from there. The emphasis is always on beat 1. Each is evenly spaced (despite how it looks here):
a- MA- zing GRACE how SWEET the SOUND that SAVED a WRETCH like ME
3 1 2 3 1 2 3 1 2 3 1 2 3 1 2 3 1 2 3 1 2 3 1 2 3
“Gilligan’s Island,” on the other hand is in 4:
Just SIT right down and HEAR a tale a TALE of a fate-ful TRIP
4 1 2 3 4 1 2 3 4 1 2 3 4 1
When you sing “Amazing Grace” to “Gilligan’s Island” you are actually changing the meter, both musical and poetic. Think about what syllables are emphasized when you do it to “Gilligan’s Island”:
a- MA- zing grace how SWEET the sound that SAVED a wretch like Me
This is why it’s funny. You’re singing a plodding, stately hymn to the rhythm of a sea chantey. In sum, they don’t really share a meter. They share a common phrase structure.
Second, I’d like to second Grant’s choice of “contrafactum” with a little explanation. The Latin “contrafactum” (pl. contrafacta) was used, just as Grant explained, in Medieval music to indicate that it was the same song with new words, often switching back and forth between Latin and French, sacred and secular. It was a fun game to take a text about the Virgin Mary and write new words to that well-known song about a beautiful, sexy girl.
The term has been applied more generally recently, however. In jazz, for example, musicians often have taken existing songs and written new tunes to the same chords, to avoid copyright. There are hundreds of jazz songs written over the chords of Gershwin’s “I Got Rhythm.” One example is Duke Ellington’s “Cottontail.” For all of these contrafacts, you can sing “I Got Rhythm” alongside the new tune and it fits perfectly. We refer to these by the Anglicized term “contrafact.” Today, contrafact means a song which is based on major structural features of another song (the tune, the chords), and there are many different types of contrafacts. “Jingle Bells, Batman Smells” is a contrafact, and so is the “Amazing Grace” example.
Welcome. Thanks for the great information. While contrafact is a new word to me, it seems perfectly apt to this situation.
Tim G said:
My vote for the most annoying modern version of the “nails on the chalkboard” is the high pitched “BEEP, BEEP, BEEP” of any large vehicle backing up. I hate it!
Just the contrafacts: How about “homotune?”
Another obvious example: “Mary Had a Little Lamb: and “London Bridge is Falling Down.”
Having recently completed my student teaching in a classroom equiped with a whiteboard and an interactive whiteboard (commonly known as SmartBoards in our area, but that’s a specific brand name), I want to assure the world that they can still produce annoying sounds. Whiteboard markers do squeak on occassion, though not as obnoxiously as nails on a chalkboard. My first grade students and joked frequently about having “squeaky fingers” on the interactive whiteboard. I’m not sure if the problem was a very dry finger or a sweaty one, but some students were consistently unable to manipulate an object on the chalkboard without a continuous squeak. Again, it wasn’t nearly as obnoxious as nails on a chalkboard, but it was distracting enough that I asked students with sqeaky fingers to use their fingernail instead of the pad of their finger, to eliminate noise. These aren’t the only inadvertent noisemakers in a classroom, and I’m sure students will continue to find ways to make sounds that make our skin crawl!
I like using “isometric” for this.
piels said:
The nails on the chalkboard only works with the true slate blackboard, which would only exist in very old schools. The newer painted fiberboard chalkboards started appearing in the 1950′s as new schools were being constructed for the baby boomers, so only us oldsters have heard the sound. There was always the one kid that could stand the sound and would make it every time he had a chance just to freak the rest of us out.
Regarding nails on a chalkboard, the closest thing for me is a metal fork on a ceramic plate. Or metal on metal.
Ron Draney said:
Peter Schickele, creator of PDQ Bach and erstwhile host of “Schickele Mix”, could sing Robert Frost’s “Stopping by Woods on a Snowy Evening” to the tune of the tango classic “Hernando’s Hideaway”.
You can do the exact same thing with the Hebrew hymn “Adon Olam”.
**********
There is a feature on the BBC radio program “I’m Sorry I Haven’t A Clue” called “One Song To The Tune Of Another”. They have been doing it nearly every week for more than 20 years. “Clue” isn’t on BBC Radio 7 at the moment, but it keeps coming back. Check it out! bbc.co.uk
Just had to press pause while listening (and laughing) to this episode so I could come here and give a huge BRAVO to Marcia, the listener from CA who sang for us. Awesome!
Thanks Marcia, you made my listening all the more fun.
Bring v/s take.
I use “bring” and “come” together and I use “take” and “go” together. If a participant in the conversation is located at my destination,when speaking to them I am “coming” to where they are and anything that accompanies me, I would “bring”.
If no one in the conversation is located at my destination,then I’m not “coming”, I am going and anything that I drag along I “take”.
dfilpus said:
Leslie Fish is a great filker. I particularly like Carmen Miranda’s Ghost.
Glenn said:
What about this magazine cover? I wanted to post it last week when I saw it, but there was no extant thread where it would fit. Now there is!
Avocet said:
Well, either the magazine corrected the cover in the archive, or this joke cover is a shoop!
Cover with oxford comma and all
[edit: added the following.]
The magazine even addresses the hoax:
Rachael Ray altered cover
So the joke cover is a hoax. I feel betrayed. Imagine, misinformation on the internet. What have we come to? Soon we won’t even be able to trust Wikipedia.
Glenn said:
Well, shoot. I thought it was hilarious. Now it’s just moderately clever.
Little late to the discussion…but I’ve been a fan of the Amazing Grace/Gilligan’s Island phenomenon for a long time now…In my old church we sang Amazing Grace to the Eagle’s “Peaceful Easy Feeling” (they’re not quite exact in structure, but…). I sometimes do this in my head in the car…like switching off “Have a Little Faith in Me” with “Let It Be.”
As far as a word for this concept…I’m also a fan of ambigrams, and I thought why not call these songs “ambitunes”? As in, The Theme from Gilligan’s Islan and Amazing Grace are ambitunes…each song’s lyrics can be song to either song’s melody.
Filk — glad to hear the shout-out, but it is more common to science-fiction fandom than SCAdians. SCA event music runs more to Irish/folk/traditional…
I do remember one memorable filksing (a song circle primarily intended for filk) long, long ago, where a wide variety of metrical matches between widely disparate songs was explored. A memorable example was a song by Gordon R. Dickson, about the spacegoing mercenaries featured in his novels, the “Dorsai”, with lyrics of:
being put to the tune of “Yankee Doodle”….and it was considered an article of faith that ANYTHING could be put to the tune of “Greensleeves”.
“Eat Grandma” — One can also subvert the whole paradigm. I have fond memories of a high-school freshman (advanced placement) English course who wrote three unpunctuated sentences on the blackboard for us to punctuate, that was a dialog between two children regarding how they should cook and eat their grandmother…
I know style guides occupy a whole other thread. I want to bring up Strunk & White’s “Elements of Style”, specifically for this show. I recall one rule (that I agreed with and adopted myself) that stated “Always form the possessive with ‘s”, finessing the whole elsewhere-standard “if the word ends with s…” battle of exceptions and counter-exceptions. So Hendrix’s anything would always be written as such, to my mind.
> A Lawrenceville, Georgia, woman wonders: If chalkboards go the way of the buggy whip, what simile will replace the expression nails on a chalkboard?
A fork on china and fingernails on a balloon are both good–but no one said the first thing I thought of: handling Styrofoam. Gah. It gives me the shivers just typing it!
ShadowLass