Arnold Zwicky's Blog

At breakfast this morning, my daughter Elizabeth reported on her exploits in introducing bits of music to her daughter Opal — by way of putting them in a playlist on iTunes for Opal. This involves lots of trial and error; you can’t really tell what will move Opal.

The latest experiment was in rock music. E scored big with the Rolling Stones and with Joan Jett and the Blackhearts. Oh, I said, all that intense energy! O essayed bits of the oeuvre, with evident pleasure.

Then E reported on Pink Floyd’s “Another Brick in the Wall”, which O just detested. E and I helplessly went into the boys’ chorus from part 2 (“We don’t need no education …”), in our best attempt at doing the dialect (this in the University Coffee Cafe in Palo Alto, relatively crowded at the time). O pulled a sour face. E said, forbearingly, Well, in seven years or so.

E and I mostly don’t know which bits of popular culture we picked up separately (she and her friends discovered many of her three parents’ favorites on their own — very gratifying on all sides), which she got from us, and which we got from her.

I didn’t tell Opal that I used to have an 8×10 printout of

Dark sarcasm in the classroom.

Teacher, leave those kids alone!

Pink Floyd, The Wall

posted on the wall of my Stanford office (along with lots of language- and gay-related cartoons).

This entry was posted on February 26, 2011 at 5:01 pm and is filed under Music, My life, Not about language, Pop culture. 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.