The Smoke Gets In Your Eyes Ambiguity

My love is as a fever, longing still
For that which longer nurseth the disease...

Is the opening of a sonnet by Shakespeare. The love he refers to is an emotion that he has. That clear? Good.

In Philip Sidney's Arcadia a shepherdess sings:

My true love hath my heart, and I have his,
In just exchange, one for the other given.

Here the true love is a man. The sheperdess refers to him as her true love but he is a person who reciprocates her emotion. Got that? Okay. Read the following carefully:

They asked me how I knew
My true love was true.
I of course replied,
Something here inside cannot be denied.


They said, 'Someday you'll find
All who love are blind.
When your heart's on fire,
You must realize
Smoke gets in your eyes.'


So I chaffed them and I gaily laughed
To think they could doubt my love.
Yet today, my love has flown away
I am without my love.


Now laughing friends deride
Tears I can not hide.
So I smile and say,
'When a lovely flame dies
Smoke gets in your eyes.'

So here's the question: is the love that has flown away an emotion or a person? Has he been dumped, or has he dumped?

When he goes to France, he's a cross-channel Ferry.

Mondegreens And Understanding Orphans

There's a funny little thing called a mondegreen that you have, no doubt, experienced. Have you ever listened to Purple Haze and wondered whether Jimi Hendrix is saying:

Excuse me while I kiss the sky

Or

Excuse me while I kiss this guy

Have you? That's a mondegreen. A mishearing of  a song. The term was coined way back in 1954 by a lady called Sylvia Wright. She described how her mother used to read her a poem that went:

Ye Highlands and ye Lowlands,
Oh, where hae ye been?
They hae slain the Earl O' Moray,
And laid him on the green.

And she had always understood that last line to be:

And Lady Mondegreen.

Which makes some sort of sense, an earl suggests a lady. I am as prone to mondegreens as the next man, possibly proner; and my mishearings often make no cents at all. I was once involved in an argument and then a wager about whether the drink sangria is mentioned in Lou Reed's Perfect Day. I insisted that it is not. You see I know the song by heart. It goes:

Just a perfect day
Drinks and grey are in the park

I had never stopped to consider what "grey" would be doing in a park. Mrs Malaprop informs me that at her school the Banarama lyric "Guilty as a girl can be" was universally heard as "Guilty as a cocoa bee". If you're French and perverse (and what Frenchman isn't?) you can wonder gallicly to yourself why Edith Piaf is singing about a pink aeroplane: L'avion rose/La vie en rose.

But the point of this post is not foolish mistakes, but the good ones.

I shall never recover from being given a lovely big hardback collection of Bob Dylan Lyrics 1962-2001. My two favourite lines were gone, vanished, vanquished by the cold, dead hand of print. First, there's the great statement of the human condition in Subterranean Homesick Blues:

Get born, keep on.

I loved that line. All life summed up in four syllables: birth and survival. That rotten book revealed that it was in fact "Get born, keep warm", and I've never been truly happy since. But worse than that mondegreen, much worse was what unambiguous ink did to It's All Over Now Baby Blue. I knew the song started like this:

You must leave now, take what you need, you think will last.

But whatever you wish to keep you better grab it fast.

He understands you orphans with his gun.

It's a brilliant line. First you have a reversal, something equivalent to "He nurses you with his fist", but more brilliantly, there's the leaping of categories. Understanding with a gun is what a philosopher would call a category error. A category error is a statement which is not simply wrong, but which could not conceivably be right because words from two different categories have been yoked together.

Salmon cannot read newspapers, but I can imagine one doing so. A salmon reading a newspaper is not a category error. However, "There's too much Tuesday in my rhubarb crumble" is unimaginable as, though Tuesday is a noun, it's not a physical one and could therefore not be mixed up with rhubarb. Nor could you have too little or too much Tuesday. Similarly one cannot understand with a gun in any normal sense. That's what gives Dylan's line its power. It parodies violence by expressing it as a form of comprehension. Clever, eh?

That bloody book.

Yonder stands your orphan with his gun.

I shall maintain till the day I die that my cloth ears improved those songs.

I was reading a friend's website the other day and momentarily misread the line "Next time there better be mistakes" as "Next time there'll be better mistakes."

The Inky Fool listening to Bob Dylan

P.S. A mondegreen is almost the same concept as a holorhyme, about which I blogged in December.

When Did You Stop Beating Your Choirboy?

Spot the connection between these two:

I read, much of the night, and go south in the winter.

   - Eliot's Waste Land

POPE'S BROTHER: I HIT CHOIRBOYS

  - Today's Times

You can't work out the tense in either. The "read" in Eliot and the "hit" in The Times could both be past or present.

The English verb has three principle parts: I write, I wrote, I have written. Some verbs make do with two: I walk, I walked, I have walked. And some lazy, idle, good-for-nothing verbs make do with one: I hit, I hit, I have hit; burst, burst, burst; read, read, read.

There's a particular problem with read as, though the parts are all written identically, the first is pronounced as reed and the others as red. This awkwardness often pops up on the Letters Page:

Dear Sir,
I read this paper every day.

Dear Sir,
I read this paper every day until 1947 when your journalism went to the bloody dogs.

And the reader has to jump back to the beginning of the sentence and repronounce the word in his head. T.S. Eliot, I suspect, intended this ambiguity of sound and tense in The Waste Land. It is the last line of a section whose grammar and subject have become increasingly confusing until, with this line, it breaks up like a bad telephone connection. The advantage of being a Top Poet is that all your mistakes are assumed to be intentional.

Given that hitting children became illegal under German law in 1980, The Times' ambiguity is commendably reckless.

"Me again. How about a nice Emperor's Crown?"

Appealing

I was reading this week's copy of The Week and was astonished to discover that:

  Brown appealed to voters last weekend

I felt that I had missed something, and not just any little thing but a huge upheaval in the British political landscape (I love the idea of the political landscape: I imagine moral highgrounds, clear blue water, emotional hiterlands and disputed centre-grounds all overhung by mountains of debt). However, reading onward I found:

to "take a second look at Labour"

Ambiguities are bound to infiltrate even the most careful prose and I suppose this one could only have been avoided by resorting to that obscure and arcane word "asked".

Who could resist that puppy-dog smile?

Parallel Adjectives

There's always a problem with parallel adjectives - good times and bad times - that, if not antithetical, they at least imply mutual exclusivity. If I say that there are good writers and there are Welsh people, I imply a difference between the two. I only thought of this because of headline in today's Observer that went:

THE TRAGEDY OF BRITISH CHILDREN RAISED BY ALCOHOLIC PARENTS

Damn those dipsomaniac foreigners: coming over here drinking our whisky, stealing our children etc etc.

Foreigners celebrating a succesful kidnap

Progressive

The Miliband brothers seem to get disproportionate coverage on this blog. Here's an article from Ed:

There is a big fight on for Britain's future. The tide isn't running out on progressive ideas. People don't live in the politics of an electoral pendulum, they live in changed times where progressive values are more, not less, powerful. If we go out and make the case, we should be confident we can succeed.

The word progressive is one of my pet hates*. Everybody is progressive, we differ only on definitions of the word. Every so often I hear a politician say that he wants what's best for Britain, but they never follow this up with free whiskey for all or the humane destruction of the Cornish. It's always healthcare or further education and other ideas that wouldn't make my top forty.
 
Every policy progresses somewhere. Theocracy, communism, genocide and compulsory nudity might all be progress in somebody's estimation, though I support only two of them. Mr Miliband is right, though trite, that the "tide" can never "run out" on progressive ideas (which I suppose form the beach in which the unpendulous case-makers are fighting). Progress can never stop, but to what strange utopias it may lead, nobody knows.
 
There are three exceptions to this rule. First, progressive and regressive taxation have both become technical economic terms. The former means taking from the rich and giving to the poor, the latter the reverse.

Second, progressive tenses, of which I shall blog some other time.
 
The third is a progressive disease: the stately progress of dementia, gangrene, cancer and the like. I had a friend who went for a test for a very serious disease. He was a trifle nervous so the nurse reassured him that it would "all be positive".
 

David Miliband searching for a pendulum

 
 
* I love the idea of a pet hate. I dream of a menagerie of malevolences and I would feed them and stroke them and take them for walks and they would be the happiest hatreds in the whole wide world. They'd wake me up every morning by licking my face with their vindictive tongues.

Later Today

I arranged by telephone to meet Mrs Malaprop for a curry tomorrow night. At the end of the call I said "Good bye" (as it was spoken I didn't even have to think about the one-word-or-two dilemma). She said "See you later" and hung up.

This valediction made me think that she had misunderstood the arrangement and was coming for a curry tonight. So I sent her an e-mail which ran:

You said "see you later" did you mean "tomorrow"?

To which she sent the lapidary and laconic response:

Yes. That is later.

This threw me into terrible bewilderment as to me later means later today. Of course things can happen "a few years later", but I always use that plain, naked, unadorned later to mean "before bedtime". Certainly if somebody told me that we were going to the cinema later, that wouldn't mean June. But perhaps it's me that's mad and Mrs Malaprop who controls the heights of normality.

I have also never been quite certain whether the phrase "You'll be late for your own funeral" contains an intentional pun.
 

The funeral of the late Sir John Moore

Linear Ambiguity

This morning I saw a headline squashed into a side-column:

BODY OF JOURNALIST
KILLED BY BOMB
IS FLOWN HOME

The problem was that I was reading it line by line (as I had to). So when I had finished line two but not started line three, the thing had a strangely metaphysical feel to it.

Years ago I used to proof read (appropriately, no two dictionaries can agree on whether proof read is one word, two words or hyphenated) TV listings: the little programme summaries towards the back of the newspaper. I learned so many wonderful things back then. I learned that outtake is one word, that EastEnders has a capital E in the middle and that people read sentences from the beginning to the end. The reason for that last one was that each episode of a soap opera would have two main plot strands, so the descriptions I proofed would look like this:

Ben ends up in bed with Tyra and Wayne loses his job

The problem with this sentence is that the reader is likely to read it from beginning to end. This means that half way through the sentence the reader has:

Ben ends up in bed with Tyra and Wayne

"Wow!" thinks the reader. "A threesome!" But then he finds the orphaned words:

loses his job

A verb and object cut loose from their mooring and left to drift incompletely on the seas of grammar. The reader is puzzled for a moment. He feels lost. He feels betrayed. He feels as Helen Keller would if you chucked her out of an airplane. Then, in a flash, he realises his mistake. He puts his finger back at the beginning of the sentence and starts again:

Ben ends up in bed with Tyra [pause] and Wayne loses his job.

So one of my main jobs was to put a comma before the word and. This was not because there was any grammatical necessity. The conjunction and between two main clauses is usually unpunctuated. It was merely a readerly necessity because readers move from the beginning of the sentence to the end interpreting all the time.

In this we are quite different from the Germans and Romans and anyone else with a very inflected language. In Latin you have to read the whole sentence and then make a guess as to its meaning. This is because the word order is so loose that a main verb or restrictive modifier can be skulking at the end of a sentence. What that patient waiting for the full stop does to the whole nature of the German mind I quiver to think and it is, anyway, beyond the mandate of this blog.

English is ambiguous and the reader impatient for meaning. Of course this allows for one our simplest forms of humour, the twist at the end of the sentence, as in "I don't go to church in the nude... much."

All of this is terribly acute if there's a line or page break to halt the reader, but I suppose that both are pretty perilous anyway. There was a glorious Mail article about how the

amputee model Heather
Mills married Beatles leg-
end Paul McCartney

And page breaks allowed my favourite joke in Hancock's Half Hour where a policeman on the witness stand is reading testimony from his notebook. He concludes:

I apprehended the suspect and took him into custard.

He then licks the tip of his finger, turns the page of his notebook and adds:

Ee.

You, You, You and Mrs Prufrock

There's a letter in this week's Economist on the meanings of the word we.

In English we have three: the regular we meaning you and I, as in "we had dinner together"; the royal we meaning I, as in "we are not amused"; and the marital we meaning you, as in "we need to take out the garbage."

This is all awfully true and reminded me of a theory of mine about The Love Song of J. Alfred Prufrock and the word you.

You has two meanings in normal English. It can mean you, the person I'm talking to, or it can be synonym for one, as in "I know the route I have to take. You go up here and turn right", which is the same as "One goes up here and turns right."

In love poetry (and songs) you acquires more ambiguity. You can be the poet addressing the reader or the poet addressing the beloved. I just listened to "You're sixteen, you're beautiful and you're mine" even though I am none of the above. I understood that Johnny Burnette was singing to somebody else. Whereas when Paul McCartney sings "She was just seventeen/You know what I mean", the you is me, the listener.

The word you pops up ten times in Prufrock. Two of them are in inverted commas and don't count ("I am Lazarus, come from the dead, Come back to tell you all, I shall tell you all"). That leave eight. Two of them pretty much force an interpretation.

The eyes that fix you in a formulated phrase,
And when I am formulated, sprawling on a pin,

You and I are the same person here, which means that you must be one.

And would it have been worth it, after all,
After the cups, the marmalade, the tea,
Among the porcelain, among some talk of you and me,

You is part of a list of physically present objects and is clearly another person. That leaves us with eight other yous malingering in the poem. Two of them are in inverted commas and don't count. So that leaves six. How should you/one/I interpret them.

That leaves six uses that could be considered ambiguous, but I don't think they are. The reason for this is the title of the poem. I once wrote a poem called Letters to the Sultan. I showed it to a friend who said that he liked it but "They all seem to be letters, right?" "Right," I said. He paused and then asked, "Who are they to?"

Readers tend to discard titles and all the information given in them. Eliot did not have to call The Love Song of J. Alfred Prufrock a love song. He could have called it a song, or simply Prufrock (in fact he originally titled it Prufrock Among the Women, which suppports the point I'm about to make).

So the title of the poem is:

The Love Song of J. Alfred Prufrock

And the first line is:

Let us go then, you and I,

So the you, is the beloved. Not to interpret it so is, at best, perverse. It is not the reader, it is not one (or there wouldn't be an I attached). Nor is there any suggestion that he is addressing his consciousness. It is pretty much the same as Come live with me and be my love: a love song addressing an imaginary beloved and enjoining her to get a move on. And things become more interesting if you carry this through.

The next you is here:

Streets that follow like a tedious argument
Of insidious intent
To lead you to an overwhelming question . . .
Oh, do not ask, "What is it?"
Let us go and make our visit.

We are only on line ten. There is no suggestion that the you has changed. You, the woman, is being led to the overwhelming question, not Prufrock. Prufrock is just walking. His woman is thinking about profound and overwhelming questions and he wants her to stop so that they can make their visit. Capish?

The next you is:
 
There will be time, there will be time
To prepare a face to meet the faces that you meet;
 
If we stick with the you as a woman the line makes extra sense. It's about make-up.
 
There will be time to murder and create,
And time for all the works and days of hands
That lift and drop a question on your plate;
Time for you and time for me,
And time yet for a hundred indecisions,
And for a hundred visions and revisions,
Before the taking of a toast and tea.

Again you is getting a question dropped on her plate. It's therefore reasonable to assume that this must be the same you who was being led to the overwhelming question twenty lines before. You is not me. There is time for you and time for me, clearly separated and delineated. And here's the important point: the murder, creation and question that are for you, are contrasted with the time for me (Prufrock) which will be devoted to indecision, toast and tea.

Here is the point. Prufock is unhappy, conscious of his own inadequacy etc etc etc (all the usual interpretations of him) because he is going out with such an profound woman. That is the conflict and the constrast of the first half of the poem. The point is the juxtaposition. The man's spiritual and intellectual inferiority among the women. She asks overwhelming questions. He worries about baldness. She wants to murder and create. He wants tea.
 
There is a simple delineation that every critical essay I've ever read manages to miss. She's profound and he's doesn't want her to be because it makes him feel shallow. He wants them to make their visit and not have some deep discussion on the way (I have been on similar dates).
 
There's even further evidence that a woman is physically there in lines 55-6:
 
Is it perfume from a dress
That makes me so digress?
 
So that's the first half of the poem. A carefully constructed juxtaposition of profound woman and man who doesn't dare to think about such things and disturb the universe. Then in line 69 he starts to try and say something. But he then realises that any attempted profundity on his part would not have been worth it after all if it wasn't the same profundity that the woman had meant.
 
And the beauty is that it is at this point that the yous disappear. She becomes a one, remote and considered. The poem now seems to become a soliloquy. (I imagine the dietary enquiries concerning peaches to be aporias). Until the woman with all her magical, other-worldly thoughts has become transformed into a magical other-worldly woman - a mermaid - and the women will not sing to each other, not to him.
 
Got that? Now go back and read the poem again. Don't pretend you have something better to do. You don't. Here's the link.
 
Of course you can go on reading it as an allegory of the Bermaniac relationship between image and consciousness of whatnot, so long as you remember that there's absolutely no reason to do so. Whereas my reading is clear and simple and takes account of the title.
 

Does Obama dare to eat a peach?

Could Consider Thinking About

It may simply be me, but in my precaffeinated trance this morning I read that:

A third of professors could move abroad because of government plans...

...and thought for a moment that that two thirds of professors had had their passports confiscated. Could is an awkward word ambiguously spanning possibility and likelihood. One can as easily say "I could, but I don't want to" as "I could do with a drink". The same goes for consider as in "The moral philosopher looked at his wife and considered suicide." Or indeed thinking about, as in "The efficiency expert thought about taking the day off."

An academic and his son trying to emigrate

A deceptively simple topic

Today I read a review describing a film as "deceptively lightweight". What, I wondered, did this mean? Did the reviewer think the film seems deep on the surface (surely an oxymoron), but was essentially frivolous? Or did he mean that it is in fact serious, only appearing lightweight?

This is the problem with the word "deceptively" - nobody can agree what it means when used to modify an adjective in this way. The OED definition of "in a deceptive manner, so as to deceive" is not very helpful, while the American Heritage Dictionary of the English Language (cited here at FreeDictionary.com) notes that "when deceptively is used to modify an adjective, the meaning is often unclear" - when its Usage Panel was asked to decide what a "deceptively shallow pool" meant, 50 percent thought the pool shallower than it appears, 32 percent thought it deeper than it appears, and 18 percent said it was impossible to judge.

Deceptively simple

The potential for ambiguity does not seem to have stopped people using it, particularly in arts reviews, sports commentary and property advertising. With some common phrases, it is fairly easy to grasp the general meaning. When a book, film, piece of music or other work of art is described as "deceptively simple", this generally means that it appears simple in a way that deceives the reader/viewer/listener about its essential complexity or cleverness. When applied to a recipe, however, as in Hugh Fearnley Whittingstall's "deceptively simple" blue cheese gougères, "deceptively simple" seems to mean the opposite: something which looks impressive or complicated, but is really very easy to prepare. And The Independent's description of Muse's debut album as "deceptively sophisticated" - which one might imagine to mean the reverse of "deceptively simple" - in fact suggests very much the same thing: that the album's superficial simplicity disguises an underlying sophistication.

Other meanings are harder to pin down. The estate agent's favourite, "deceptively spacious" - does it mean a property which looks small from the street, or from photos, but is actually very large? Or does it - as Dogberry thinks - mean a property which is rather small, but gives the impression of being spacious through use of light and clever decorating? Either way, it means a property whose spaciousness is compromised in some way - not very desirable, but perhaps intriguing enough to persuade a buyer to set up a viewing.

Deceptively spacious

And some usages are simply baffling. What does The Times's description of a cricketer's bowling as "deceptively effective" mean? That it was more effective than it looked? Or that it was effective because of its deceptiveness? Similarly, I quite can't work out what the "deceptive" is referring to in The Independent's description of "deceptively well-crafted poems" or The Times's of "deceptively well-made" short films, although I suspect the meaning in both cases is something close to "deceptively simple". The most marvellously mysterious, though, was the reference in a Times music review to Deep Purple's "deceptively funky cymbals". It is clear from the context that this is a good thing, but beyond that the meaning is entirely lost on me.

It seems that the advantages of versatility and conciseness (it's quicker and neater to say "deceptively shallow" than "shallower than it appeared") overrule any concerns about confusing the reader. "Deceptively" also allows the writer to lay claim to a degree of perspicacity in discerning what is not immediately apparent; this may also be part of its appeal.

Deceptively funky

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Start 'Em Young

DOMESTIC VIOLENCE LESSONS PLANNED
   - According to the BBC

I remember the time I applied for the post of "Hate Crimes Coordinator" for Hackney Council. I thought I had that job sewn up. There are a lot of hate crimes coordinators out there, from Wigan to Los Angeles.

Well done, Jenkins! You're making progress.