Three is not at all like a bajillion.
Everything is like everything else in some respect (respect may vary on identity of items).
respect may vary on identity of items
At my grocery store, that very message is on the Express Lane sign right below "10 Items or Fewer."
It might not be you, Stanley. There was a radio edit that cut out that verse. If that's the version you heard, you wouldn't have heard that lyric.
I'm pretty sure it's use, not mention, unless there's another omitted verse that goes, "That person over there called that millionaire a little faggot."
Mark Knopfler totally really did have to move those refrigerators. Personally.
7: despite its often being the case that a song is sung or rapped by a persona stipulated to be different from that of the actual singer/songwriter, I don't think you can get away from the fact that the song "uses" the word under any ordinary understanding of use.
8, 11: The lyrics are adapted from an overheard conversation of working-class folk ripping on how easy the job of MTV artists is. Pretend the entire lyrical body of the song is enclosed in quotation marks and you'll have the correct semantics: mention, not use.
The song is fairly dripping with irony, particularly given its heavy rotation on MTV when it came out.
Quine said that "quotation has a certain anomalous feature."
12: My favorite morsel from the link --
Mötley Crüe bassist Nikki Sixx, in an interview with Blender Magazine, claimed that the song is actually about his band's excessive lifestyle, and that he heard the clerks in the store were commenting on Mötley Crüe videos shown on the in-store television sets
Nikki's so vain! He probably thinks the song is about him!
I don't think the use/mention distinction is really apt here, actually.
16 is right. Just ask Shakespeare Polonius.
16: How not? It's an unusual case in that the framing is implicit, but it's clearly a quotation.
I'm just happy to have another vague reason to dislike Dire Straits, since my previous reason ("Their music sounds like they're on cocaine") seemed sort of weak.
"Their music sounds like they're on cocaine"
???
Are you fucking high?
Stanley, I'm thinking you're better off going with, "I just don't like how it sounds."
16: How not? It's an unusual case in that the framing is implicit, but it's clearly a quotation.
Guess what: I don't think the use/mention distinction is really apt to cover all cases of quotation, too!
I can clearly use what I quote, without impugning its status as a quotation. If I say to you, "One of these days … bang, zoom, right to the moon!", I can be quoting Honeymooners and also threatening you. There would be no point to the quotation if I weren't also using what I say in making the quotation to threaten you (jocularly, perhaps). Compare that to a straight-up mere mention: "The acceptability of one African American addressing another as 'nigga' differs greatly from that of a white person doing so." To no extent am I using the quoted word, I'm simply saying something about it. What I quote matters insofar as the truth of my statement depends on the quoted term, since I'm saying something about it, but it doesn't matter otherwise.
In the case of something like "Money for Nothing", even if you think there's an implicit frame beyond the (also implicit) quotation of the (views characteristic of the) mindset expressed in it, that doesn't make it not merely quoted but also mentioned (mentioning after all requires a context, you can't just utter "your mother fucks dogs in hell" and count as mentioning it).
Another reason it isn't apt is, well, what are you getting at by invoking use vs. mention here? Is it supposed to be some kind of insulation from the effects of the mentioned terms, to suggest that you're not really saying what you only mention? Because that doesn't fly. ("If I were to say to you something like, 'your mother fucks dogs in hell', you'd probably be upset—so I wouldn't do that. Nor would I ever say something like, say, 'you're a talentless idiot', because that too would be offensive if I said it. I certainly wouldn't suggest that …".) Are you just reminding us that there's an object language and a metalanguage? Ok, but so what? Or are you reminding us that Knopfler isn't speaking in propria persona? That may well be true, but it doesn't mean that he isn't using "faggot"; in one natural sense he's using it to communicate the impropria persona. I just don't think that kind of thing could work if he were merely mentioning the words.
20
Yes, who can forget such cocaine-fueled ditties as "Brothers in Arms", "Romeo and Juliet" and "Private Investigations"
I can't believe you said that my mother fucks dogs in hell, nosflow. What kind of monster are you?
Yes, who can forget such cocaine-fueled ditties as "Brothers in Arms"
Nothing like a shit-ton of cocaine to make you write ballads about the Falkland War. One is reminded of Rick James's hit The Sinking of ARA General Belgrano.
Stanley's the only one here who's a professional musician. If he says cocaine makes you sound like Dire Straits, he must know.
What does marijuana make you sound like? Tosin Abasi?
||
So I'm booking a hotel room in New Orleans for tomorrow night, and one of the hotels is actually offering windowless rooms. Sorry, make that "Rock Star Windowless Rooms". Branding!
|>
Sorry, make that "Rock Star Windowless Rooms".
That means you're allowed to throw the lamp through the wall to make your own window. Rock n' roll!
Rockstar pit of despair and self-hatred for suicidal cocaine binges?
Given the ways in which age, beauty, and wealth are interrelated, the sad truth is that there is vastly more rock-star-style sex between beautiful people going on in windowless basements than in all the world's expensive hotel suites combined.
There's a cap on the amount of beauty that can be around sex. So if the people are young and taut, the surroundings must sag.
35: well, sure. Conservation of hotness.
Our house sure is getting beautiful, though.
27- Did you just mention that nosflow is fucking Walt's mother?
I consider 14, 17 & 18 to be extreme shorthand for 23.
39: It's like sanctity of off-blog communication means nothing anymore around here.
39 - I did! The question is what I implied about the beauty of the surroundings.
I love Coke! But it makes me gassy. Reeeeally gassy. So now mom only keeps Sunny D around the house. :(
But enough about my mom. Let's talk about me! I've been watching Pokemon all day and now I gotta catch 'em all! Pokemon is the best!
Them faggots get their chicks for free ! Misappropriation, if I
may say so.
They certainly didn't use cocaine before the first album was recorded. Maybe before it was released.
The point of having the character say the word faggot is so the listener will not sympathize with the working class character but will instead sympathize with the object of the character's ire, rock stars. Mark Knopfler said on MTV that he overheard some delivery guy saying this and that he thought the delivery guy underestimated how hard it was to be a rock star. I think that the point is that he, Mark Knopfler, worked really hard as a rock star and would never be so uncouth as to call someone a faggot.
WE GOTTA MOVE THESE REFRIGERATORS!
Since the advent of flat screen technology, is the moving of color TVs no longer so difficult?
51: To the contrary. Nowadays, the moving of a television can easily imply a plasma donation.
As a Knopfler sympathizer, I would like to agree with 49, but I don't. Likewise, I feel certain that Arlo has repented of his use of that word in Alice's Restaurant, but it doesn't matter.
Historical fact: Birth of a Nation and Triumph of Will were brilliant. Still doesn't matter.
53
Yeh apparently they have another questionable song as well:
http://www.lyricsfreak.com/d/dire+straits/les+boys_20040731.html
As a Knopfler sympathizer, I would like to agree with 49
49 is not actually a very sympathetic portrayal of Knopfler.
23: Well, can I at least get you to agree that three isn't very much like a bajillion at all? I'd like to be able to claim some sort of fucking victory in this thread.
56: You win. I was speaking hyperbolically.
Don't give in, Stanley. Never admit to a commenter that you are wrong. Say something like "The ancient Sumerians didn't even have a word for three. They used 'bajillion' to mean any quantity bigger than two."
I love the Les boys song so much.
I really don't read it as being homophobic, but maybe that's just a willful reading.
53: That line in Alice's Restaurant always bugged me, too, even though I imagined it sung with implied scare quotes. Same with the Phil Och's classic, "Love Me, I'm a Liberal," and it's reference to the DAR. As much as key members of my feminist foremothers can make me crazy (a good bit of my dissertation involved reading A LOT of rad fem work), they were operating in/against a leftist circle full of misogynistic, heterosexist assholes. Thank gods for progress [/snark]
I don't know "Money for Nothing," or at least I don't know that I know it, but I feel like the lines in question from Alice's Restaurant and (more ambiguously) LMIaL are used with the purpose of further establishing the homophobia of the military and the liberals, respectively. I guess I'm puzzled where the line is between having a homophobic character in a movie use "faggot" or a racist one use "nigger" in order to have the speech patterns fit the personality (presumably ok?) and putting it in a song as something a similar character would say or think (apparently not ok?).
Not to defend Knopfler [of whose music I am not a fan], but the fact that he/they are British is also relevant. The word 'faggot' can only be reported speech.
49 is right re: the intent of the song, and 55 that it's not very sympathetic.
61: That line in Alice's Restaurant always bugged me, too ... Same with the Phil Och's classic, "Love Me, I'm a Liberal," and it's reference to the DAR.
They do grate. However, it is good to remember that both of those were over 40 years ago and reflect the predominant views of most of the progressive movement at the time (see also sexism) much less the population at large. As cultural relics they are much closer in time to Ilsa in Casablanca saying Captain, the boy who is playing the piano, somewhere I have seen him. (A line that I notice is no longer part of that bit of dialogue quoted at IMDB.)
This is depressing. Women's labor participation rates have been declining faster than men's in the Lesser Depression since 2005, but you know what is really really important?
What that evil enemy of freedom Phil Ochs said about the DAR.
Or what? Just read the lyric, and leaving aside the irony, I don't see the problem.
against a leftist circle full of misogynistic, heterosexist assholes.
Go love you some neo-liberals, they have the diversity patter down now. They'll talk pretty and let the Right take it all away.
65.2: What is the line that you think we speak of? It is an aside that is not generally found in the printed lyrics.
66:I don't care what Ochs said. Let me imagine the most vicious misogynistic homophobic hate-speech, he was still worth 10 Yglesias + 10 Kleins to blacks, women, and gays. Ochs couldn't imagine how horrible liberalism could get.
Except maybe to the elite ones or the ones for whom tribal identity trumps all.
I'm so tired. The Robeyns/Nussbaum/Sen stuff is such a sophisticated capitulation.
I have to stop caring.
I have to stop caring.
No, bob, no! That's the Hegemon talking!