Arnold Zwicky's Blog

That’s country as in “country music” and country singer Kevin Fowler, who recently released the obscenity-laced but kiddy-safe “Pound Sign #?*!”, using spoken obscenicons to achieve this effect. It’s going on a new Linguist’s Playlist, on Linguistic Examples.

(Hat tip to Jason Cox.)

The lyrics, given here in full, so you can get the effect of the repeated two-line figure:

Dog-tired

Yeah, I’m wired
Uptight-er than an a-string
About to break

Tail-draggin’
A little ragged
Hangin’ by a thread
That’s startin’ to fray

Just in case there might be
Little ears around
I won’t say it
I’ll just spell it out

I feel like pound-sign, question mark
Star, exclamation point
Don’t give a blank
And a whole lot of other

Choice words I can’t say
Today I feel like
Pound-sign, question mark
Star, exclamation point

Hung-over
A lot closer
To ringin’ death’s door
Than I was yesterday

Head-achin’
Hand-shakin’
Badly in need
Of a shower and shave

Yeah, I know I’m lookin’
A little rough
The least I can do
Is clean my language up

I feel like pound-sign, question mark
Star, exclamation point
Don’t give a blank
And a whole lot of other

Choice words I can’t say
Today I feel like
Pound-sign, question mark
Star, exclamation point

I think I partied
A little too hard last night
Let’s see here now
How do I put this right?

I feel like pound-sign, question mark
Star, exclamation point
Don’t give a blank
And a whole lot of other

Choice words I can’t say
Today I feel like
Pound-sign, question mark
Star, exclamation point

Don’t give a blank
And a whole lot of other
Choice words I can’t say
Today I feel like

Pound-sign, question mark
Star, exclamation point
Percentage sign, at symbol
Back-slash, squiggle-thing

Pound-sign, question mark
Star, exclamation point

(Those two lines quickly have a hypnotic effect as they’re repeated, probably since their meter is so much more regular, four dactylic feet with the first “truncated” to a trochee,

´˘  ´˘˘
´˘˘  ´˘˘

than the rest of the lines, which are metrically closer to ordinary speech than to song.)

Spoken obscenicons — in fact, spoken punctuational obscenicons (rather than cartoonists’ squiggly obscenicons, which make only one appearance in Fowler’s lyrics) — have come around at least three times on Language Log, always in comic strips:

in Mark Liberman’s 2005 “You taught me language, and my profit on’t / Is, I know how to curse” (here), in a Foxtrot toe-stubbing strip;

in my 2008 “Reading the ampersand comics!” (here), in a Get Fuzzy strip with the dog Satchel screaming words he learned to say from “the ampersand comics”;

and in my 2009 “Comic profanity” (here), from a Rubes strip in which a boy tells on his younger brother: “Mom! Bobby said asterisk, ampersand and other assorted grammatical symbols representing comic profanity!”

But Fowler might (or might not) be the first person to say it in a song.

It’s time to add “Pound Sign #?*!” to my newly-created iTunes playlist Linguistic Examples, as an instance of spoken obscenicons. This list is particularly tricky to get going, since examples of linguistic phenomena are dense indeed in popular music, especially music that’s intended to be funny. For this list, I’m collecting only examples that I judge to be especially fine or unusual. So far, Fowler’s song is joined only by that marvel of zeugma, Flanders & Swann’s “Madeira, M’Dear”. But I’m still very very slowly working my way through things that readers of AZBlog have suggested. (And some nice examples of split (or broken) rhyme are on their way.)

The other lists:

Grammar, with performers’ names, album titles, track titles, and lyrics “about” grammatical phenomena (three Schoolhouse Rock tracks, “Colorless Green Blues” by Dick Dative and the Experiencers, Leeny and Steve’s “Ain’t Ain’t a Word”);

Linguists: The Magnetic Fields, “The Death of Ferdinand de Saussure”; The Horsies, “Noam Chomsky”; Dick Dative and the Experiencers, “Please Mister Postal”; and a track, “The Seventh Spiel”, picked at random from The Sapir-Whorf Hypothesis’ first album, self-titled;

Morphology, with examples of interesting morphological phenomena: Gilbert & Sullivan’s “Come Mighty Must” from Princess Ida (nouning); Red Hot Chili Peppers, “Californication”; Bonzo Dog Doo-Dah Band, “The Intro and the Outro” (portmanteau?); The Who’s “Underture” from Tommy (portmanteau?);

for the moment, a list just for Puns: Rammstein’s “Du Hast”;

and Terminology, for things not already covered: Bonzo Dog Doo-Dah Band, “Labio Dental Fricative”; They Might Be Giants, “I Palindrome I”; “Metaphor” from The Fantasticks; Vampire Weekend, “Oxford Comma”.

This entry was posted on July 16, 2010 at 10:44 pm and is filed under Language and music, Obscenicons, Taboo language and slurs. You can follow any responses to this entry through the RSS 2.0 feed. You can leave a response, or trackback from your own site.