Anatomy of a "Cold-Blooded Murder"

Based on George Bernard Shaw's Pygmalion, My Fair Lady has that crackling dialogue, those sweeping melodies from Frederick Loewe, and the echoes of Rex Harrison and Julie Andrews in every lyric. And on the whole, the lyrics they got to sing are expert. But I have a bone to pick with Alan Jay Lerner, the lyricist: he's just not British. I listened to the London cast recording that Harrison/Andrews made and wondered just how the Brits reacted to their language being American-ized unwittingly.

Why Can't The English?
By right she should be taken out and hung
For the cold-blooded murder of the English tongue!
Just you wait, Henry Higgins. The irony is that Lerner murders the English tongue right here. She should be hanged with a noose, not hung like laundry.

Oh, why can't the English learn to
Set a good example to people whose English
Is painful to your tears?
It works when set to music; nevertheless, there are three "to"s here. And there's so much going on: are the "people" also English? "You" is the English people, suddenly in second person?

I'm An Ordinary Man
I'd be equally as willing for a dentist to be drilling
Than to ever let a woman in my life
Just like good deeds, one "as" deserves another. A "more than" comparison might have served our expert grammarian better.

I'm a very gentle man...
Who has the milk of human kindness
By the quart in every vein
People knew this even before Pulp Fiction: Europe's got the metric system!

On the Street Where You Live
The whole song, really. Freddy's a lightweight, but I reckon he still knows that in England, one is in a street, not on it.

You Did It
Higgins: "Thank heavens for Zoltan Karpathy. If it hadn't been for him, I'd have died of boredom. He was there, alright, and up to his old tricks."
Mrs. Pearce: "Karpathy? That dreadful Hungarian. Was he there?"
Higgins: "Yes."
There's no grammatical jumble here. Mrs. Pearce just sounds like she has a hearing problem. This exchange is captured for posterity on the original Broadway and London cast recordings, but was fixed for the film.

Show Me
Don't talk of June, don't talk of fall,
Don't talk at all -- show me!
The English prefer "autumn." Lerner actually revised these for the London recording in 1959. But when the 1964 film rolled around, "fall" returned to its post. Perhaps he thought the Brits wouldn't watch because of Audrey Hepburn. The revised London lyrics (on all counts an improvement):
Please don't implore, beg, or beseech,
Don't make a speech -- show me!


Get Me To The Church On Time
Drug me or jail me,
Stamp me or mail me
We can see the problem here. The film executives couldn't; they kept the Broadway lyric. My question is, wouldn't Stanley Holloway, or Julie Andrews in the example above, have mentioned that they as Brits find these lyrics odd? The revised, London-only lyrics:
Drug me or jail me,
Bond me or bail me

A Hymn to Him
The real lyric: What in all of heaven could've prompted her to go?
Rex Harrison reads it as "What in all in heaven" on both the Broadway and London albums. Quit, Professor Higgins. Maybe the grammar slips had vexed so much by this point that he'd grown accustomed to them.

This has been an update of Musical Theater Is An Important Art Form. Time for a PBS pledge break!

What The World Doesn't Need Now

a. Clue, the movie, the sequel! The press slogan is that Clue will be "a global thriller and transmedia event that uses deductive reasoning as its storytelling engine." So basically, it's going from a board game to a super-campy comedy with a crackerjack cast of weirdos (here's looking at you, Madeline Kahn) to another Jason Bourne movie. How global can Clue get? It all takes place in a house! When I play with Lauren and Amy, we always add in the bathroom for fun, but that's as far as I see it stretching. Let's not even talk about the updated board game, which decides those swanky '30s dinner parties just aren't that cool. The revolver has become a shotgun. Will the movie amp it up to bazookas?

b. Musicals based on action/superhero movies:

     Spiderman, the musical, will open on Broadway February 2010. (Please let them sing 

          "Spiderpig" at some point! "Can he fly? / No, he can't.")

     Star Wars: A Musical Journey premieres in London in April. (Hit song suggestions: "The 

          Moment, This Is," Yoda's big showstopper. "And I Am Telling You I'm Not Frozen" 

          when Han busts out of carbonite. When Darth Vader battles his demons at the end of 

          Jedi, he'll fly up into the air and sing "Defying Palpatine.")

Google Update: Just the way you are

This one's more interactive, because I don't have time for screenshots. Go to Google and type in "why do I have." The first two results are great juxtaposed.

Then try "you are a" and add random first letters for the next word. "You are a v" yields some pretty special things: "you are a very special person" is right above "you are a victim of the rules you live by." Maybe those rules mean that "you are a vampire," in which case you don't like sunlight... so -- more searching for you! -- "you are a victim of windows." I am sitting in my bay window nook right now and praying that they don't attack me.

"You are a c" might lead your mind to terrible places, but the real ones are loving: you're a chef, a child of God, a child of the universe even. "You," Google searchers say, "are a choir boy compared to me." Perhaps because the searcher is a vampire! The top two searches for just plain "you are": first you're beautiful, then you are what you eat. I guess you eat beautiful things.

All sorts of compliments roll out when people search for that mysterious "you." You, my friend, are a god and I am not, a fishmonger, a hard-working analyst in the office of financial operations. On the flip side, you are also "a jerk in Spanish" (just in Spanish) and a "rude thoughtless little pig." Did you make the Big Bad Wolf angry?

And what am I? I am America and so can you! I am a zombie and it's not so bad! I am a jelly donut; I am a eunuch (who shares that?).

I am a kitty cat and I dance. Dance. Dance.

A Google of Geese

Courtesy of Fail Blog (yes, it's true, go check it out):
Where Fail Blog leaves off, curiosity takes over. If 300,000 people are extremely terrified of Mao et al., what else stirs them up in cyberspace? (There's a word, btw, that went the way of "the Web".) What emotions are they dealing with amid their xenophobia?

Thank God for fat and sassy... but still, more of us are terrified of the Chinese. If you're feeling low, do you spend time on the Internet? It won't love you back.
Okay, we're depressed so we watch movies, ergo we are fat. Then we grow more depressed because we hated, hated, hated the movie we saw. Just so you know how emphatic we are:
'Net surfers need to let loose somehow. In our rough economic times, though, maybe it's just to hard to kick back. The community chest is empty, the utility tax slashes into your savings... the parallels seem all too real:

Mind If I Pontificate?

I was trying to recall my favorite words, and it turned out tons of them start with P.

Perspicacity. I first heard this word in a song from Anyone Can Whistle: "How you say, imperturbable perspicacity." When I learn new words, I try to use them in speech. My brain and tongue crossed signals, and for the first few days of acquiring this word, I pronounced it "per-scip-a-city." Not very shrewd of me.

Pusillanimous. Picked this up from The Wizard of Oz, when I was young and innocent, and didn't know what satire was. Imagine my excitement when I discovered it meant cowardly.

"Every pusillanimous creature that crawls on the Earth or slinks through slimy seas has a brain.
Back where I come from, we have universities, seats of great learning,
where men go to become great thinkers. And when they come out, they think deep thoughts
and with no more brains than you have. But they have one thing
you haven't got: a diploma."

Now my favorite. Pulchritude. Be honest, you think of a corpse with empty eye sockets, rotting in a musty grave and covered in cobwebs. In actuality, it's a word for great physical beauty. You open your bedroom window and part the drapes for a sight of the sun rising behind mountains caked in white. It's one of those words that conveys something much more striking than I originally supposed. Kind of like the letter P; it's an ugly little bugger, but look at the great words it heads.